A fast and efficient tool to study the rheology of dense suspensions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a high-performance software tool for simulating the rheology of dense suspensions, emphasizing computational efficiency, memory management, and validation against experimental data.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, efficient implementation of neighbor search and contact history tracking for dense suspension simulations, enabling large-scale, non-monodispersed particle modeling.

Findings

Significant reduction in computational cost due to optimized neighbor search.

Effective handling of high size-ratio particles in large domains.

Validation confirms accuracy against previous simulations and experiments.

Abstract

A cutting-edge software is presented to tackle the Newton-Euler equations governing the dynamics of granular flows and dense suspensions in Newtonian fluids. In particular, we propose an implementation of a fixed-radius near neighbours search based on an efficient counting sort algorithm with an improved symmetric search. The adopted search method drastically reduces the computational cost and allows an efficient parallelisation even on a single node through the multi-threading paradigm. Emphasis is also given to the memory efficiency of the code since the history of the contacts among particles has to be traced to model the frictional contributions, when dealing with granular flows of rheological interest that consider non-smooth interacting particles. An effective procedure based on an estimate of the maximum number of the smallest particles surrounding the largest one (given the radii distribution) and a sort applied only to the surrounding particles only is implemented, allowing us to effectively tackle the rheology of non-monodispersed particles with high size-ratio in large domains. Finally, we present validations and verification of the numerical procedure, by comparing with previous simulations and experiments, and present new software capabilities.