BlazeDEM3D-GPU A Large Scale DEM simulation code for GPUs

¹ Research Center Pharmaceutical Engineering, GmbH, Graz, Austria
² Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, University of Pretoria, South Africa
³ Mines-Douai, LGCgE GCE, F-59508 Douai, France
⁴ Université de Lille, 59650 Lille, France
⁵ Department of Mechanical Engineering , University of Johannesburg, South Africa

^* e-mail: govender.nicolin@gmail.com
^** e-mail: wilkedn@gmail.com
^*** e-mail: patrick.pizette@mines-douai.fr

Published online: 30 June 2017

Abstract

Accurately predicting the dynamics of particulate materials is of importance to numerous scientific and industrial areas with applications ranging across particle scales from powder flow to ore crushing. Computational discrete element simulations is a viable option to aid in the understanding of particulate dynamics and design of devices such as mixers, silos and ball mills, as laboratory scale tests comes at a significant cost. However, the computational time required to simulate an industrial scale simulation which consists of tens of millions of particles can take months to complete on large CPU clusters, making the Discrete Element Method (DEM) unfeasible for industrial applications. Simulations are therefore typically restricted to tens of thousands of particles with highly detailed particle shapes or a few million of particles with often oversimplified particle shapes. However, a number of applications require accurate representation of the particle shape to capture the macroscopic behaviour of the particulate system. In this paper we give an overview of the recent extensions to the open source GPU based DEM code, BlazeDEM3D-GPU, that can simulate millions of polyhedra and tens of millions of spheres on a desktop computer with a single or multiple GPUs.