Numerical Simulation of Interaction of Solid Particles With Elastic Bodies By a Lagrangian-Lagrangian Approach

Interaction between solid particles with elastic bodies often occurs in industrial products, for example powder conveying using rubber tubes or blade-cleaning process. In such processes, elastic bodies, or rubberlike material often changes their shape extremely large. It is difficult to acquire the internal information of elastic bodies in such processes by experiments, and the methodology of contact problem of elastic bodies with large deformation has been not established because Finite Element Method, the conventional structural analysis method, has a difficulty of simulating both of contact problems and large deformation analysis. Therefore development of a method that can deal with such phenomena is expected in industrial area.

Accordingly, we developed the coupled analysis method using Finite Deformation theory based Particle Method (FD-PM), which was developed on the assumption of large deformation and Discrete Element Method (DEM) as the model to represent contact between solid particles with elastic bodies. The extra algorithm is not required to combine these two methods because FD-M and DEM are both Lagrangian methods. Numerical simulations were executed for validation. The deformation of the elastic bodies was measured and the results of the simulations corresponded with experiments at the same scale.