Theory and Application of Discrete Element Method to Simulation of Multiphase Flows

Ramesh K. Agarwal, Ph.D., is the William Palm Professor of Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Washington University in St. Louis. From 1994 to 2001, he was the Sam Bloomfield Distinguished Professor and Executive Director of the National Institute for Aviation Research at Wichita State University. From 1978 to 1994, he was the Program Director and McDonnell Douglas Fellow at McDonnell Douglas Research Laboratories in St. Louis. He received his Ph.D. in Aeronautical Sciences from Stanford University in 1975, an M.S. in Aeronautical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1969, and B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in 1968. Over a period of 50 years, Professor Agarwal has worked in various areas of computational science and engineering, including computational fluid dynamics (CFD), computational acoustics, magneto-hydrodynamics and electromagnetics, computational materials science and manufacturing, computational control theory and robotics, and multidisciplinary design and optimization. The range of applications in CFD includes subsonic, transonic and hypersonic flows, rarefied and micro-flows, active flow control, turbulence modeling, bio-fluid dynamics, turbomachinery and pumps, wind energy, energy efficiency of buildings, carbon capture and sequestration and chemical looping combustion.  He is the author and co-author of over 600 publications and serves on the editorial board of more than 20 journals. He has given many plenaries, keynotes, and invited lectures at various national and international conferences in over 60 countries worldwide. Professor Agarwal continues to serve on many professional, government, and industrial advisory committees. He is a Fellow of 32 professional societies including the AIAA, ASME, IEEE, SAE, AAAS, APS, and IOP. Professor Agarwal has received many prestigious honors and national/international awards from various professional societies and organizations for his research contributions, including the AIAA Reeds Aeronautics Award, SAE Medal of Honor, ASME Honorary Membership, and an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Aeronautical Society. Yali Shao, Ph.D., is currently an associate professor in the School of Energy and Mechanical Engineering at Nanjing Normal University in Nanjing. She received her Ph.D. in 2020 from the Key Laboratory of Energy Thermal Conversion and Control of the Ministry of Education, School of Energy and Environment at Southeast University, Nanjing, under the guidance of Prof. Baosheng Jin. Dr. Shao has worked in the areas of numerical simulation of multiphase flow, chemical looping carbon capture technology and ammonia-hydrogen zero-carbon fuel utilization technology. She is the author and co-author of over 30 publications. Dr. Shao has collaborated extensively with Professor Ramesh K. Agarwal in the area of DEM and CFD simulations in the past seven years, which is continuing. She has also co-authored many publications with Professor Agarwal in international journals.

• Nomenclature.- Introduction.- Theoretical Framework.- Contact Mechanics.- Particle Shapes and Contact Parameters.- Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).- Fluid-Particle Coupling Schemes (CFD-DEM).- Application of DEM to Fluidized Bed.- Application of DEM to Dense Granular System.- Application of DEM to Aerodynamic Particle Separation of Mixture Particles.- Application of DEM to Powder Transport System.- Application of DEM to Battery Technology.- Machine Learning and Optimization.- Strategies for Large-Scale CFD-DEM Simulations.- Challenges and Future Research.