Design And Realization Of DEM Simulation Interaction System For Granular Material In Rotary Drums

Rotary kilns,coating machines and other process equipments with rotaty drum are widely used in metallurgical,pharmaceutical,chemical and other industries for heating,mixing,cooling and drying of granular materials.Particle mixing in rotary drums is one of the important factors affecting the product quality and production efficiency,which is the current research hotspot.With the rapid development of high-performance computing technology,Discrete Element Method(DEM)has become a powerful tool for studying the dynamics of particle in rotary drums.However,the DEM simulation requires a large amount of calculations and takes a long time.During the simulation,the parameters cannot be modified,and the interaction between simulation and physical device cannot be realized.Therefore,when the simulation are deviated from the experiment,users has to interrupt the simulation and modify parameters,then restart the simulation,which will reduce efficiency of simulation.In order to solve the issues above,a DEM simulation interaction system is designed,and the human-computer interface based on Visual C++ is developed by taking the rotary drums particle system as the object and considering the relationship between simulation and physical system fully.In the present work,the interaction between DEM-simulation and the physical experiment platform of rotary drum was realized,which has high theoretical and practical value.The research done in the present work and the main achievements are:(1)The functional requirements and the design scheme of DEM simulation interaction system were presented,the corresponding software was written with Visual C++,and the key technologies were analyzed;(2)Physical experiment platform was set up for studying the mixing process of spherical particles in a rotary drum.And the interface between the software and the rotary drum experiment device was established,for acquiring the rotation speed in real-time.Then a human-computer interaction was realized,and the corresponding data can be saved;(3)A particle system based on DEM was modeled,by using PFC3D for simulating the mixing process of spherical particles in the rotary drum.In addition,the communication between human-computer interface and DEM model was achieved.Then,the interaction between DEM simulation and VC++,and the visualization of particle mixing under different rotation speed were realized;(4)The DEM simulation interaction system for granular material in rotary drums was experimentally tested with rotation speed as varing parameter.The results show that the system can obtain the rotation speed in real time,judge the change of rotation accurately,and dynamically adjust the rotation in the DEM model of the particle system,which can inherit the simulation process,and improve the simulation efficiency.Then,the interaction between DEM simulation and the physical system was realized.Finally,the time evolution of repose angle of simulation interaction system was compared with the physical experimental measurements,which verified the simulation accuracy of the interaction system.