Editor’s Pick: EDEM 2019 Rolls Out

Dear DE Reader:

Today's Editor's Pick of the Week demonstrates that rolling rocks and tumbling particles make fascinating, hard-to-crack simulations. To that end, EDEM 2019 discrete element method (DEM) software for bulk material simulation rolled out at the end of last year. It appears to be loaded with goodies that'll go down in history with current users and grab potential users' attention.

Backfill: You use EDEM technology to simulate and analyze the behavior of bulk materials as well as the interaction of materials and equipment under operation and process conditions like feeding a pill roller compactor, dumping stuff into a truck bed and more. Those materials can be lumpy mined ores, sticky soils, fine powders and so on. The company offers a library with thousands of pre-calibrated material models. You can customize and extend simulations with the EDEM API (application programming interface), and you can couple EDEM with FEA (finite element analysis), CFD (computational fluid dynamics) and other CAE (computer-aided engineering) technologies.

Now the skinny on EDEM 2019 is that you can do more of all that faster. Key is the new EDEM multi-GPU (graphics processing unit) solver engine. This means that you can run larger, more advanced simulations and everything should be faster. Depending on what you're doing, your mileage may vary, but the company reports that you could realize a performance boost somewhere between 30% and 90%.

Next is a nifty sounding tool called EDEMpy. It's really a Python-based library—thus, the “py”—for post-processing and analyzing large amounts of EDEM simulation data. You can do a lot of stuff with EDEMpy, including jobs of your own making.

EDEM cites numerous possibilities. You can, for example, pull out forces acting on some intriguing geometry over time and compare results between multiple simulations. You can also track particle residence time over the course of a simulation or visualize networks of contacts and bonds.

Still, the wait-a-minute element in EDEM 2019 may be the beta debut of a breakage model. EDEM reports that it can describe the fracture of particles subjected to repeated loading by simulating surface degradation and body breakage. It handles catastrophic breakage from high impact and surface breakage from abrasion. A link at the end of today's main write-up takes you to a blog post on the breakage model that includes a cool animation. 

Your Pick of the Week offers more details about EDEM 2019. There's a bucket load of links at the end to explore.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, DE