An Introduction to Discrete Element Method: A Meso-scale Mechanism Analysis of Granular Flow

The phenomenon of granular flows appears frequently in industrial and daily life. The particle-particle interaction plays an important role in granular flows, which makes the flows have some strong nonlinear characteristics and so different from the normal materials, either solids or liquids. Discrete element method (DEM) is a powerful tool to catch this interaction in meso-scopic scale. A brief review of DEM is presented, including some of our new works in this area. DEM can also be coupled with other CFD methods for simulations of solid-liquid suspension flow. An example of such coupling is presented in this article as well.