A DEM study on the thermal conduction of granular material in a rotating drum using polyhedral particles on GPUs

A number of industrial applications require the control of granular material temperature across individual grains. Particle level simulations using the DEM is thus critical for optimization. However due to computational cost, particle shape in DEM is often omitted. In this paper advances in GPU computing via the Blaze-DEM code is used to study the effect of particle shape on heat transfer in a rotating drum. Shape irregularity was found to have the greatest effect with non-symmetric shapes having a better heat conduction of at-least 30%. A linear trend of system temperature as function of both RPM and fill level was found. In all cases temperature increased sub-linearly over time. All shapes where found to be sensitive to particle size increases larger than 1.5x. Finally significant diffusion of particles in the axial direction demonstrated the importance of considering the full domain rather than a slice to limit computational cost.