Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics for Numerical Simulation of Duct Conveying

An efficient smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method for duct conveying is proposed. The combination of meshless and Lagrangian nature inherent in the SPH methodology avoids the disadvantages of traditional numerical methods in treating large deformations, large inhomogeneities and tracing free surfaces in the duct conveying process. Major physics of the duct conveying can be well captured in the simulation. The most time consuming part for the SPH simulations is to identify all the interacting particles at each time step. In this study, an accurate and efficient hierarchy tree algorithm for the nearest neighboring particle searching is presented. The SPH method proposed can be easily extended to deal with many other problems of duct conveying if simulation control parameters such as input condition, boundary condition and corresponding equation of state etc. are defined properly.