EDEM Research Spotlight- The Adaptability of Discrete Element Method (DEM) for Fibrous Agricultural Materials
Altair Employee- RESEARCHER
- Adam Kovacs
- INSTITUTE
- Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary
- DEPARTMENT
- Department of Machine and Product Design
- SUPERVISOR
- Dr. Gyorgy Kerenyi
- TIMELINE
- 06/2015 - Present
Numerical modelling of agricultural crops is becoming much more widespread but there is no suitable simulation method that could predict the interactions among fibrous agricultural materials (stalks and stems) and machine parts. Our study focuses on the developing of a new discrete element model (DEM) for maize to analyze the complex phenomena in a corn head, particularly during harvesting. Laboratorial three point bending, transversal compression, dynamic cutting and corn ear detachment experiments were conducted to define the main mechanical parameters and behavior of corn stalks. For the DEM simulations of the laboratorial tests, EDEM Academic (DEM Solutions Ltd., Edinburgh) and Timoshenko-beam bonded model were selected. With modifications of the geometry structure and the input parameters of the contact model, during an iteration process, the right assembly was found. The findings of the study clearly demonstrate that DEM is capable of simulating the mechanical and physical behaviour of fibrous materials during different laboratorial tests and EDEM is a powerful tool to manage complex, large-scale simulations. PUBLICATIONS Adam Kovacs, Krisztian Kotrocz, Gyorgy Kerenyi: The adaptability of discrete element method (DEM) in agricultural machine design. Hungarian Agricultural Engineering: Volume 27, pp. 14-19., 2015. Adam Kovacs, Gyorgy Kerenyi: Comparative analysis of different geometrical structures of discrete element method (DEM) for fibrous agricultural materials. CIGR-AgEng Conference, Aarhus, Denmark, 2016. Adam Kovacs, Gyorgy Kerenyi: Stochastic variation in discrete element method (DEM) for agricultural simulations. Hungarian Agricultural Engineering: Volume 30, pp. 31-38., 2016. Adam Kovacs, Gyorgy Kerenyi: Modeling of corn ears by discrete element method (DEM). 31st European Conference on Modelling and simulation (ECMS 2017), Budapest, Hungary, 2017. Adam Kovacs, Istvan J. Jori, Gyorgy Kerenyi: A new discrete element model (DEM) for maize. 75th International Conference on Agricultural Engineering
(Land.Technik AgEng 2017), Hannover, Germany, 2017.
Fig. 1. Cross section of corn
Simulation of dynamic cutting experiment
Simulation of corn ear detachment
Fig. 2. Geometrical structure of the DEM geometrical structure
Simulation of corn harvesting
Simulation of transversal compression experiment
Simulation of three-point bending experiment
Frankly, EDEM is the best commercial discrete element software that provides very useful options to set up complex simulations and unique tools to analyse the results. The professional team beyond the software is always helpful regardless how silly your question is. Thanks to the continuous development EDEM is always ready to cope with the latest challenges! My favourite development in the latest version, EDEM 2018, is the Dynamic Domain, that makes my simulations on harvesting much quicker by solving contacts close to the corn header.