A. Kwade, C. Schilde, S. Beinert
Wiley
Chemical Engineering & Technology
Grinding is an important process in the mineral, chemical and pharmaceutical industries. In the last couple of years, the discrete element method (DEM) has become more and more important for modeling different grinding processes and for the calculation of stress mechanism, frequency and intensity. As the DEM was designed for the calculation of particles, fluid interaction is not taken into account. However, in many grinding processes, wet-operated mills are used. Here, first, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was used to compare simulated bead-bead or bead-wall contacts with an analytical solution. To realize this, a displacement force acting on two beads in a fluid while they approach or depart is introduced. This displacement force was used to develop a new contact model for the DEMThe results show that this approach can potentially be used to simulate a wet-operated mill (including a high number of particles) with a one-way coupling. To develop the displacement force, assumptions are made that limit the new contact model to relatively simple geometries and low Reynolds numbers.
comminution, Mills, Simulation