What’s New in EDEM 2025 – Release Highlights
Altair EmployeeAltair® EDEM™ is defining the industry standard for the Discrete Element Method (DEM) by continuing to deliver new key features for physics modeling and customization. With EDEM 2025, new physics models - a Fibers Bonding Model, Liquid Bridge Model, and updated Linear Elastic Bond Model (LEBM) with polyhedral particles- enhance workflows and enable a realistic representation of fibers and particles for applications in agriculture, batteries, and pharmaceuticals. Updates to the application programming interface (API) empower users with advanced customization options, including the ability to exploit particle shapes in custom contact models and collect runtime statistics.
Here are some more details of the key highlights from this latest release now available on Altair One!
World’s Most Advanced Model for Fibers
Since the addition of meta-particles, users have been requesting a dedicated fibers model with greater accuracy and stability when modeling flexible fibers. The new fibers bond model accurately handles the stiffness of cylindrical-section, curved, and heterogeneous fibers, where the thickness and material properties can change along the fiber. It features bending-caused fiber breakage and plasticity. It will be particularly useful for agricultural and health & life sciences applications, offering better insights and accuracy for representing the behavior of fibers with market-leading performance.
This new model has been specifically designed for flexible fibers, offering more stability and accuracy than a general-purpose bond model. This extra stability allows the use of larger timesteps, resulting in a dramatic performance improvement of up to 20x faster!
Innovative New Liquid Bridge Model
To expand the range of applications available, the new liquid bridge model introduces a unified force between particles or particles and geometry to better represent the real-world behavior of wet particles and how they respond to one another. Users should consider using this model when the material is to be slightly wet or partially saturated but not fully saturated.
Enhanced Capability for Polyhedral Particles
Users can now achieve an even better representation of polyhedral particles using the Linear Elastic Bond Model (LEBM) released in EDEM 2023. The previous implementation of the LEBM required the contact radii to be overlapping to maintain the bond. With the addition of the Preserve Contact functionality to the Contact Model API, bonds can now extend beyond the contact radius and will break only once the specified force is reached. This improvement will allow users to achieve more control for particle breakage and experience high performance and accuracy for specific types of applications.
Volume Packing Improvements
Volume Packing is a highly used capability, and many requests have been made to improve its usability and functionality. With an improved setup and better progress feedback prior to the simulation start, users can gain more control over the material generation.
What else?
Beyond these new capabilities and improvements, this release also brings other important developments, including:
- DEM-CFD Coupling Improvements with Altair AcuSolve: This coupling continues to grow in popularity and users have been requesting an easier way to set up coupled solutions and to use the coupling to model more complex scenarios. The result has seen a simplified workflow for AcuSolve-EDEM use cases with faster simulations.
- Couplings Now Available in SimLab (BETA): By integrating into Altair SimLab, users can now expand the possibilities when coupling to AcuSolve for CFD and OptiStruct for FEA analysis, offering users the ability to bring the unified interface. This is now available to users as a BETA.
- API Updates for more complex contact models: Important updates in the API have been added, representing a big step forward for customization. Users can now better exploit particle shapes in custom contact models and collect runtime statistics, among other key features.
- Usability updates for EDEMpy: EDEM now creates an environment variable with the current deck path, name, and directory path. This means that EDEMpy scripts run by the analyst can be created to work generically without relying on preference files to specify the deck path.
To learn more about what is new in EDEM 2025, check out the release notes available on Altair Marketplace.