A spheropolyhedral-based discrete element lattice Boltzmann method for simulation of non-spherical adhesive particulate flow

Non-spherical particulate flow is commonly encountered in nature, industry and our daily life. But up to now, there still lack effective model to describe the adhesive elastic collision between non-spherical microparticles. To solve this problem, a spheropolyhedral-based discrete element method (DEM) combined with Johnson-Kendall-Roberts (JKR) model is proposed. The contact between non-spherical particles is attributed to the contacts between three geometry features, including vertice-vertice (V-V), vertice-edge(V-E), vertice-face (V-F) and edge-edge (E-E). The JKR adhesive model is modified to calculate the contact force of the contacting geometry features based on the actual contact area. Meanwhile, the lattice Boltzmann coupled with the immersed moving boundary (LB-IMB) method is employed to simulate the fluid flow and fluid-particle interaction. The novel spheropolyhedral-based DE-LBM is verified to be accurate and effective by several experiments and the data in references. Finally, an application test for simulating the packing process of non-spherical microparticles is presented. The method well predicts the packing structure of both adhesive and non-adhesive non-spherical particles, meaning that it can be easily extended to simulate the massive non-spherical microparticles with high effectiveness and efficiency.