CFD-DEM-FEA three way coupling for water jet cutter

QinHe_321 · 2025-06-19T18:09:04+00:00

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For water jet cutter, first stage is water pressing soil, second stage is cutter push soil, then cycle again.First stage requires EDEM-CFD coupling, while second step requires EDEM-FEA explicit dynamic coupling.

as part of head, water jet spin with it. So CFD should change with FEA cutter head.
Since there's no three way coupling solution exists in Simlab, is it possible to use load case, do several two way coupling instead? While storage timesteps between these coupling?

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Accepted answers

Stephen Cole

Hi,

As you mention there is no 3-way coupling but you could consider calculating the CFD fields and importing those for 1-way coupling. As the cutter rotates you would rotate or switch the field along with this.

https://community.altair.com/discussion/35352/edem-api-particle-body-force-field-data-coupling-multiple-fields-cuda

So you would not be seeing the impact of the particles on the flow field but would be using the flow field to drive the particle motion. If using this it isn't a coupling so you can still couple to another program.

Regards

Stephen

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Stephen Cole

Hi,

https://community.altair.com/discussion/35352/edem-api-particle-body-force-field-data-coupling-multiple-fields-cuda

Regards

Stephen

QinHe_321

That's a good solution, but how should I make the field change with cutter rotation?

Stephen Cole

In the above custom model 'field data coupling multiple fields' this is a model where you can import multiple fields into EDEM. You could create a few different fields at different rotation angles, there is an associated text file where you can define the inputs:

#Number_of_fields
4
#Switch_field_every_X_seconds(time_interval)
0.5
#density
1.225
#viscosity
1.7e-5

In this example we're cycling through 4 fields, it's best to keep the numbers of fields low when running on GPU as it's easy to use up all the GPU memory.

Alternatively the field data code can be modified, if its essentially 1 field in a rotating reference frame, this could be implemented but we don't have an example for that.

QinHe_321

I see, but I cannot predict the cutter's location since it is part of the result of simulation, and there are too many phase in many time steps.