Fluid interaction with PFC

Hello everyone,

I hope you are doing well. I have an inquiry regarding the way of coupling modules between DEM and LBM for fluid interaction in PFC. I am using PFC3D v6.0 and I want to introduce fluid to a small assembly of particles using Lattice Boltzmann Method. How to interact between both methods, especially that timestep is different for each phase. The LBM code can be written in Python but I want to elaborate the way they are being coupled in one simulation. I hope anyone can help and guide me. Your help is highly appreciated. Thank you,

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Hi,

I don’t think there is any ready-to-use answer, and I am afraid LBM-DEM is a task you will have to spend time on : the equations, parameters, and numerical resolution must be adapted to your very specific case, especially when resorting to external coupling.

Itasca specialists did address this issue in 2D (see Han and Cundall 2017) but I don’t think the code is distributed.
There might exist research codes on this subject, but again, I am not sure they are open-source

If you’re ready to dive into the subject, you can have a look on external coupling softwares (https://precice.org/). Notice that Itasca softwares support sockets through Fish and Python, which might be of help for dynamically exchanging data with external codes.

Good luck!

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