By Dinesh Gera, Fluent and Shinichi Oka, Fluent Asia Pacific

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Yutaka Tsuji

Bubble tracking using the Discrete Element Model (DEM) in a jet-driven fluidized bed

Professor Yutaka Tsuji of the Mechanical Engineering Department of Osaka University in Japan has been working closely with engineers at Fluent's West Virginia office in the US and Tokyo office in Japan to couple his discrete element model (DEM) for simulating dense granular flows with FLUENT. Prof. Tsuji is a distinguished researcher and pioneer in the field of DEM with many publications to his credit, and is a coauthor of a textbook on multiphase flows.1 His work is helping to delineate this rapidly developing field of particle technology with some exciting opportunities in the fields of fluidized beds, tablet coating, ball mills, and chute/hopper flows, among others, where particle-particle interaction is important. The coupling of Professor Tsuji's code with FLUENT has been successfully demonstrated on 2D and 3D bubbling fluidized bed applications through User Defined Functions (UDFs), and is ideally suited for systems with up to one million particles. One second of real time with one million particles takes less than a day to simulate on a 2 GHz INTEL processor machine using the FLUENT 6.1 – DEM coupling. The research that led to the coupling of the DEM models was conducted in collaboration with Dr. Thomas J. O'Brien of U.S. DOE's National Energy Technology Laboratory.

Reference:

1 Crowe, Clayton, Sommerfield, Martin, and Tsuji, Yutaka, Multiphase Flows with Droplets and Particles, CRC Press, ISBN 0-8493-9469-4, 1998.

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