Body fitted link-cell algorithm for particulate flow simulation in curved pipeline domain

Abstract The link-cell (LC) algorithm is widely used in discrete element method (DEM) simulation, in order to increase computational efficiency. The common way is to divide the entire computational domain into a series of square sub-cells. A huge index matrix, Ω , is required to store the information of particles located in each of these sub-cells. However, most of these sub-cells are always empty for some anomalistic computational domain, such as particulate flow in a pipeline. These empty sub-cells also consume the limited memory bandwidth and lower the computational power. In order to reduce the size of the index matrix, a body fitted link-cell (BFLC) algorithm is established to identify the neighbors quickly. Furthermore, a simplified algorithm for simulation of two dimensional particulate flow in curved pipelines is presented. Lastly, an example is presented to validate the BFLC algorithm.