Abstract
In the following paper the authors present a fully parallelized Open Source method for calculating the interaction of immersed bodies and surrounding fluid. A combination of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and a discrete element method (DEM) accounts for the physics of both the fluid and the particles. The objects considered are relatively big compared to the cells of the fluid mesh, i.e. they cover several cells each. Thus this fictitious domain method (FDM) is called resolved. The implementation is realized within the Open Source framework CFDEMcOupling (www.cfdem.com), which provides an interface between OpenFOAM® based CFD-solvers and the DEM software LIGGGHTS (www.liggghts.com). While both LIGGGHTS and OpenFOAM® were already parallelized, only a recent improvement of the algorithm permits the fully parallel computation of resolved problems. Alongside with a detailed description of the method, its implementation and recent improvements, a number of application and validation examples is presented in the scope of this paper.