The CFD-DEM model, or Computational Fluid Dynamics / Discrete Element Method model, is a process used to model or simulate systems combining fluids with solids or particles. In CFD-DEM, the motion of discrete solids or particles phase is obtained by the Discrete Element Method (DEM) which applies Newton's laws of motion to every particle, while the flow of continuum fluid is described by the local averaged Navier–Stokes equations that can be solved using the traditional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) approach. The interactions between the fluid phase and solids phase is modeled by use of Newton's third law.
The direct incorporation of CFD into DEM to study the gas fluidization process so far has been attempted by Tsuji et al. and most recently by Hoomans et al., Deb et al. and Peng et al.
Parallelization
OpenMP has been shown to be more efficient in performing coupled CFD-DEM calculations in parallel framework as compared to MPI by Amritkar et al.