A novel method for modeling of complex wall geometries in smoothed particle hydrodynamics

Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) has become increasingly important during recent decades. Its meshless nature, inherent representation of convective transport and ability to simulate free surface flows make SPH particularly promising with regard to simulations of industrial mixing devices for high-viscous fluids, which often have complex rotating geometries and partially filled regions (e.g., twin-screw extruders). However, incorporating the required geometries remains a challenge in SPH since the most obvious and most common ways to model solid walls are based on particles (i.e., boundary particles and ghost particles), which leads to complications with arbitrarily-curved wall surfaces. To overcome this problem, we developed a systematic method for determining an adequate interaction between SPH particles and a continuous wall surface based on the underlying SPH equations. We tested our new approach by using the open-source particle simulator "LIGGGHTS" and comparing the velocity profiles to analytical solutions and SPH simulations with boundary particles. Finally, we followed the evolution of a tracer in a twin-cam mixer during the rotation, which was experimentally and numerically studied by several other authors, and ascertained good agreement with our results. This supports the validity of our newly-developed wall interaction method, which constitutes a step forward in SPH simulations of complex geometries. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.