Modeling granular material blending in a rotating drum using a finite element method and advection-diffusion equation multi-scale model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-scale model combining finite element and advection-diffusion equations to efficiently predict powder blending in rotating drums, closely matching detailed DEM simulations but with significantly reduced computation time.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel multi-scale modeling approach that integrates particle diffusion and flow field data to accurately predict mixing in rotating blenders more efficiently than traditional DEM methods.

Findings

Model predictions closely match DEM simulation results.

Significantly reduced computation time compared to DEM.

Effective parametric analysis of mixing parameters.

Abstract

A multi-scale model is presented for predicting the magnitude and rate of powder blending in a rotating drum blender. The model combines particle diffusion coefficient correlations from the literature with advective flow field information from blender finite element method simulations. The multi-scale model predictions for overall mixing and local concentration variance closely match results from discrete element method (DEM) simulations for a rotating drum, but take only hours to compute as opposed to taking days of computation time for the DEM simulations. Parametric studies were performed using the multi-scale model to investigate the influence of various parameters on mixing behavior. The multi-scale model is expected to be more amenable to predicting mixing in complex geometries and scale more efficiently to industrial-scale blenders than DEM simulations or analytical solutions.