Discrete Element Modelling and its Applications

Discrete Element Modelling (DEM) involves the simulation of the motion of a group of particles interacting through contacts under an external stimulus. In simple terms, the core idea of the method is to integrate the equation of motion describing Newton’s second law of motion (F=ma) to estimate the particle’s new position at each instance. Despite being a computationally simple procedure, it provides insights into the physical system across various science and engineering domains. With the advent of high-performance computing, DEM is already providing solutions to various industrial problems such as mixing in chemical/pharmaceutical industries, bulk material transport in mining industries, packing solutions for food processing industries, design of agricultural machinery from tillage to final processing of food grain and powder flow and powder bed preparation in additive manufacturing. This talk will briefly discuss DEM concepts and demonstrate the application of the method for engineering problems, followed by an outlook for the future. In this talk, we will show some DEM simulations performed using commercial DEM software Altair-EDEM.