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EDEM coupling with Fluent for Two-Phase Fluid

Hello,
I’m working on coupling EDEM with Fluent. In my case, the domain is rectangular, with the bottom half filled with water and the top half with air. Particles are falling from the air onto the water surface, and I want to study their behavior in the presence of water.

I’m using the default EDEM-Fluent coupling provided by Altair, which works fine for a single fluid phase. However, when I try to simulate two fluid phases (air and water), the simulation crashes. I get an error saying: “Particles not found in EDEM”, and from that time step onward, all particles disappear on the EDEM side.

Has anyone experienced a similar issue? Is there an alternative way or another coupling method that supports two fluid phases?

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

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PrasadAvilala

Hi Saeed,

Three phase coupling is supported by EDEM, it works well with EDEM-AccuSolve and pretty much possible with Ansys as well.

I feel some boundary condition or Particle time step might be higher, please reduce time step in EDEM. try to maintain 100 times the CFD/DEM timestep if CFD time step islarger please reduce CFD time step.

Thanks,

Prasad A

SaeedT

Hi Prasad,

Thank you very much for your response and suggestions.

I have already tried the three approaches you mentioned—reducing the EDEM timestep, decreasing the CFD timestep, and keeping the proper ratio between them—but unfortunately, the problem still persists. The simulation crashes and the continuity residuals suddenly increase to a very large number, and all particles disappear from the EDEM side.

I should mention that I received one coupling compliance setup directly from Altair. It seems to work well for a single fluid phase, but when I define two Eulerian phases in Fluent (air and water), I noticed that all fluid behavior parameters (like drag, lift, virtual mass, etc.) are activated only for the primary phase. For the secondary phase, only drag and lift become active by default.

Because of this limitation, I started to wonder if there are different types of coupling compliance available—specifically ones designed to support multiple liquid phases in Fluent-EDEM simulations.

Do you know if there’s a version or configuration of the coupling that allows for fluid-particle interaction with more than one liquid phase?

I’d really appreciate your guidance on this.

Best regards,
Saeed