Size segregation of granular materials in a 3D rotating drum

Abstract

Particle simulations were among the first applications to be implemented on scalar computers over forty years ago, and have since played an important role in many science and engineering applications [ 1, 41. Because of the inherent parallelism in all particle algorithms the advent of parallel computers has revolutionized this field: basically, the same set of calculations has to be performed for every particle in the system. At present, realistic simulations with a few million particles are possible using large parallel computers.

In this paper the parallel simulation of the size segregation of a binary mixture of granular materials in a half-filled three-dimensional rotating drum using the discrete element method with linear contact forces is investigated. Performance results of an implementation in Fortran 90 using MPI for data communication on CRAY T3D, T3E-600, T3E-900, and T3E-1200 are presented.