アプリケーションギャラリ

This study presents a two-stage discrete element method (DEM) simulation of thermal conduction in compressed granular materials. In the first stage, a granular bed composed of spherical grains is mechanically compacted by applying a constant pressure of 20 kPa through a downward moving top wall. Periodic boundary conditions are imposed along the lateral directions to represent bulk material behavior. The compaction process generates a dense grain packing that serves as the initial configuration for the thermal analysis.

In the second stage, the compacted granular bed is subjected to thermal conduction with fixed temperature boundary conditions applied at the top and bottom walls. Grain motion is frozen during this stage, and only conductive heat transfer through grain contacts and grain and wall contacts are considered. This decoupled approach enables the use of an implicit Generalized alpha solver, resulting in a substantial reduction in computational cost compared to fully coupled DEM-thermal simulations. Thermal simulation of 8 hours of physical time requires approximately 30 seconds of computational time.