What’s New in EDEM 2022.3 – Release Highlights
Altair EmployeeAltair® EDEM™ 2022.3 is now available from the Altair Marketplace. This release represents the culmination of the effort to provide full alignment between our CPU and GPU solvers, allowing EDEM users to benefit from a great GPU performance with all EDEM capabilities enabled. This, in addition to new capabilities to reduce the simulation footprint for users completing large simulations in the Cloud offering a significant reduction in cost for users, and a new post-processing analysis to calculate intra-particle spray coating algorithm that allows analysing of coating distribution within polyhedral particles for different scenarios without re-running the simulations. The last one is particularly useful in Pharma for tablet coating analysis.
Closing the Gap with the CUDA GPU Solver
The performance increase of the multi-GPU CUDA solver has been an incredible advancement for EDEM. For design engineers, time to insight and time to market are critical factors for the manufacturing industry, and when it comes to granular material simulation EDEM continues to lead the way by delivering top-level performance with our lightning-fast multi-GPU solver for all our particle shapes using the latest GPU technology.
First introduced in EDEM 2022.0, our team has been working hard to enable all capabilities already available in EDEM to work with the new solver and benefit from its high-performance boost. I am now delighted to announce that with EDEM 2022.3, we have finalised the alignment of the CPU & GPU solvers with all capabilities now enabled for the multi-GPU CUDA solvers.
Volume Packing
The last capability enabled for multi-GPU. It improves performance dramatically when generating large particle beds for agriculture and off-road vehicle applications.
EDEM's Volume Packing is designed to deliver much higher particle packing density than the standard factory with all the power of GPU technology and also has been extended to all particle types (multi-sphere, sphero-cylinder and polyhedral).
New Spray Coating Analysis
A new spray coating analysis (or ‘intra-particle tablet coating’) tool has been added to the EDEM Analyst. In addition to the particle coating features already available in the solver; this new post-processing technique calculates the coating thickness distribution over a particle’s surface (tablet), to predict the coating uniformity for polyhedral shapes.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/w_C4D441EhA?controls=0
Users can define different spray gun nozzles configuration to run multiple scenarios without needing to re-run the simulation, allowing them to perform extensive what-if analysis for tablet coating systems with multiple sprays at different positions and nozzle settings to see how effectively particles are being coated in each scenario.
Export Data During Simulation Runtime
Together with the introduction of our GPU-based solvers, there has been an important increase in the simulation size, with the number of particles growing exponentially. This has been reflected in an equivalent increase in the simulation file sizes for post-processing. The increase in disk storage usage has been particularly painful for customers running DoE projects or using the cloud.
Now we are introducing the capability of exporting specific data during a simulation to avoid writing standard timestep files. With this, users can considerably reduce the footprint on disk storage.
We can now define high-frequency data export queries without any need for standard write-out data files, removing any worries about running out of disk space or reducing performance due to network-attached storage lag.
Overall, this is a significant advancement for cloud users, reducing the overhead due to reduced disk storage requirements.
For example, a simulation of 5 million particles, with 100 steps saved, can reduce the disk space requirement from 405 GB with our standard save to 8 GB using this new capability, representing a reduction of 98%.
Breakage Post-Processing Analysis for Open Systems
Our world-leading breakage model (Tavares UFRJ Breakage Model) has been very successful since first released in 2022.0. A known limitation of the original version has been the restriction to using it with closed systems, like a SAG mill, where no particles are leaving the domain during the simulation. In EDEM 2022.3, we have extended the model to also work with open systems, allowing its usage with other types of equipment, like cone crushers or transfer chutes, without the need for tricks (and consequent extra overhead) to force particles to stay in the domain.
This means that the post-process breakage analysis tool now produces accurate particle size distributions for decks with transient flow through the system with no need to retain particles and allows the model to be used with a more extensive range of equipment.
What else?
The new release also includes several other additions and improvements, like Full HD resolution to export videos, improved performance when using custom properties, adding triangle areas as geometry results, and much more.
In parallel with the new additions in this release, we have continued working on the integration of EDEM with other Altair products to offer a more complete solution.
A good example of this is the improved support of EDEM results in HyperView and Inspire Studio. Hyperview now allows using EDEM particle parameters for contours or vector plots and allows to overlay decks for analysing multi-physics simulations, including EDEM decks.
To find out more about what is new in EDEM 2022.3 then, check out the release notes that are available on Altair One.
Comments
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Congratulations on the much more appropriate colour map, at least partially for the EDEM marketing material. Will the alienating rainbow colour map in HyperView finally be replaced?
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