What’s New in EDEM 2024 – Release Highlights
Altair EmployeeAltair® EDEM™ 2024 is available on Altair One and includes many important updates and improvements. Central to this release, we have made great progress by delivering key updates to the leading ‘Tavares UFRJ model’ for particle breakage applications. In addition, we have made important improvements to the new model for particle-based paste material (‘Hydrodynamic Lubrication model’) and EDEMpy, which now also supports Continuum Analysis Data.
Here are some more details of the key highlights from this latest release!
More Accurate and Intuitive Breakage Model
Professor Tavares’ research group at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) has been successfully using EDEM for 15 years to simulate comminution and materials degradation operations. We continue to collaborate with his group to improve the ‘Tavares UFRJ model’.
With this latest release, this model has been updated to improve the workflow by removing the need for “dummy” particles representing the fines and the enforcement of a contact radius for more accurate computation of collisions and particle damages. The fragment families have also been extended to account for the breakage of smaller particles, increasing the accuracy of the model and the resulting particle size distributions.
These enhancements will be a key advantage for mineral processing equipment design engineers in the mining industry.
"The new release of EDEM has important improvements in the Tavares UFRJ Model, with greater resolution of fragment sizes generated in each breakage event (down to 1/22nd fraction of the particle size broken, in contrast with the fixed 1/5th in previous releases), besides dispensing the use of the dummy particles. Users will find it significantly more accurate and intuitive."
Prof. Luis Marcelo Marques Tavares
Improved Physics for Particle-based Paste Materials
EDEM’s Hydrodynamic Lubrication model was first introduced in EDEM 2023.1 to simulate the effect of particles as though they were fully saturated in a fluid. This unique model has been an extremely important development for engineers simulating dense suspensions and pastes materials, like the ones used in battery manufacturing, electronics, pharmaceuticals, and other industry applications. Users can benefit from an important performance improvement by being allowed to simulate slurries and paste-like materials without the need for CFD, like in the example below of a battery electrode slurry spreader.
With EDEM 2024, the model has been updated to improve performance and the accuracy of the hydrodynamic (lubrication) force of particles in contact with the geometry, showing a much greater correlation to physical testing.
Here is an example of an experimental test of a particle settling in a container with fluid*; the updated model's impressive accuracy compared with the previous release is evident.
(* Fonceca, I., Hidalgo, R.C. & Maza, D. Motion of a sphere in a viscous fluid towards a wall confined versus unconfined conditions. Granular Matter 24, 42, 2022)
EDEMpy support for Continuum Analysis Data
Previously, Continuum Analysis Data could only be accessed by exporting a file from the GUI to be then parsed in Python. Now, EDEMpy has been updated to include functions for reading Continuum Data, reducing the steps required to access the data.
This offers users the benefit of advanced processing of continuum data and custom analysis of continuum results.
Example: Left) Simulation of a blast furnace for steel-making application. Right) Time-averaged Iron particle concentration heat map calculated using EDEMpy.
Updated integrations and couplings
Beyond the improvements and new capabilities added to our product, this release also brings new features for the integration of EDEM with other software:
- Updated export for SimSolid to improve the 1-way coupling for structural analysis
- The EDEM Coupling Library has been updated to improve functionality and performance when integrating EDEM with other CAE software, with special emphasis on CFD-DEM coupling.
- EDEM-RecurDyn coupling has also been updated for better performance when running on GPU – the results have shown an impressive 10X speed up.
To find out more about what’s new in EDEM 2024, check out the release notes that are available on Altair Marketplace
Available for trial in Google Cloud
EDEM includes new features specially designed for cloud computing to reduce data storage and automate post-process actions.
With Altair’s Google partnership, users can apply for a Google Cloud free trial, to try EDEM On-demand with GPUs.
Apply here: web.altair.com/edem-googlecloud-trial