3D Simulation of fluid-particle interactions with the number of particles reaching 100 Original Research Article

high performance computing research tool has been developed for 3D simulation of fluid-particle interactions with the number of particles reaching 100. The tool is based on a stabilized space-time finite element formulation for moving boundaries and interfaces and parallel computing. Other components of this tool include: fast automatic mesh generation with structured layers of elements around the particles and unstructured meshes elsewhere; an automatic mesh moving method combined with remeshing as needed; accurate and efficient projection of the solution between the old and new meshes after each remesh; surface mesh refinement as two spheres or a sphere and the tube wall get close; and multi-platform computing. We apply this tool to the simulation of two cases involving 101 spheres falling in a liquid-filled tube. In both cases the initial distribution of the spheres in the tube is random. In the first simulation the size of the spheres is also random, whereas in the second case it is uniform. We demonstrate that the tool developed can be used for simulation of this class of problems with computing durations kept at acceptable levels.