SediFoam: A general-purpose, open-source CFD-DEM solver for particle-laden flow with emphasis on sediment transport

TL;DR

SediFoam is an open-source, parallel CFD-DEM solver developed for sediment transport, combining OpenFOAM and LAMMPS, validated through diverse tests and capable of large-scale simulations with high efficiency.

Contribution

This work introduces SediFoam, a novel open-source CFD-DEM solver specifically designed for sediment transport, integrating existing open-source tools for enhanced scalability and validation.

Findings

SediFoam accurately simulates sediment transport phenomena.

The solver demonstrates good parallel scalability up to 10^7 particles.

Validation results align well with existing literature.

Abstract

With the growth of available computational resource, CFD-DEM (computational fluid dynamics-discrete element method) becomes an increasingly promising and feasible approach for the study of sediment transport. Several existing CFD-DEM solvers are applied in chemical engineering and mining industry. However, a robust CFD-DEM solver for the simulation of sediment transport is still desirable. In this work, the development of a three-dimensional, massively parallel, and open-source CFD-DEM solver SediFoam is detailed. This solver is built based on open-source solvers OpenFOAM and LAMMPS. OpenFOAM is a CFD toolbox that can perform three-dimensional fluid flow simulations on unstructured meshes; LAMMPS is a massively parallel DEM solver for molecular dynamics. Several validation tests of SediFoam are performed using cases of a wide range of complexities. The results obtained in the present simulations are consistent with those in the literature, which demonstrates the capability of SediFoam for sediment transport applications. In addition to the validation test, the parallel efficiency of SediFoam is studied to test the performance of the code for large-scale and complex simulations. The parallel efficiency tests show that the scalability of SediFoam is satisfactory in the simulations using up to O(10^7) particles.