Advancing DEM-CFD Coupling: A Successful Visit to the preCICE Team

Last September, during my first three weeks at the University of Manchester, I had the fantastic opportunity—funded by ON-DEM—to visit the preCICE team. Our goal was to work collaboratively on DEM-CFD coupling using preCICE.

Technical Milestones and Presentations

A major highlight of the trip was presenting our current progress on coupling with MercuryDPM at the preCICE workshop. You can watch the full presentation on YouTube.

Crucially, this visit helped us get our MercuryDPM-preCICE coupling over the winning line. Beyond our specific code, it was a highly productive time for CFD-DEM in general. We spent a significant amount of time defining benchmarks for testing. Over the next year, many codes will undertake these tests as part of the official ON-DEM benchmarks.

The trip also included a visit to Munich to meet with Benjamin Uekermann and Tom Scrase. We discussed the direct coupling of MercuryDPM and oomph-lib (the so-called "Moomph" code) and weighed the pros and cons of the two different coupling approaches.

Acknowledgements

This was an incredibly rewarding visit on both a professional and personal level. I want to extend a massive thank you to ON-DEM for setting up this collaboration and supporting our further benchmarking efforts.

I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to the entire preCICE team for their great work and hospitality. A special thank you to David Schneider and Ishaan Desai for making me feel so incredibly welcome.

Report

Read the full report: A complete copy of the report detailing this visit can be found here on Zenodo.