Physical radius and contact radius in Heat Conduction Contact Model

Chao

Hello,

I have plug-in the EDEM API of the heat conduction contact model in my model.  

The heat conduction contact model I used is the heat conduction API code that can set the geometry as heat source (HeatConductionForGeometry_29July2014.zip), the link is: https://community.altair.com/community?id=kb_article&sys_id=0fadbd1edb3cc590cfd5f6a4e29619cf)

When I looked through this code, I found that this model assumed that the physical radius and contact radius are the same and this contact model can only work on the simulation when these two types of radius are the same. 

I am just wondering if I assume the physical radius is not the same as the contact radius, how do I recode this heat conduction contact model? Could you please give me some ideas or do you have any documents or references can help me to figure it out.

Kind regards,

Chao

HeatConductionForGeometry_29July2014.zip

RWood

Hi,

Since this is a conduction model it doesn't make sense to have any heat transfer occur when the particles aren't in contact. For that reason I don't think you are likely to find conduction models that will use the contact radius and not the physical radius.

However, if you want to account for convection or radiation effects (which I'm assuming is what you're after) then I can see why you might want to use the model with the contact radius. The paper that we base our heat conduction model from (Chaudhuri B.  et al. (2006) Modeling of heat transfer in granular flow in rotating vessels. Chemical Engineering Science, 61(19): p. 6348-6360. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.ces.2006.05.034) does mention the effects of the interstitial fluid between elements, convection and radiation, but they are not the focus of the model. All I can suggest is reading up on associated works to see if anyone has modelled these effects using a contact radius approach instead.

Cheers,

Richard