Engineers can now model bulk material behavior more realistically to better support heavy-equipment design. The recently announced partnership between FunctionBay and EDEM provides a co-simulation path to combine bulk material behavior simulation accurately with heavy-equipment simulation. Users can simulate bulk materials with EDEM’s Discrete Element Modeling (DEM) technology, feed the simulation data to the RecurDyn multi-body dynamics tool to model heavy-equipment behavior and then feed data back to EDEM to provide realistic force-feedback simulation for the system.
Engineers can reduce reliance on expensive prototypes and rule-of-thumb methods with this approach. The computational requirements and complexity of co-simulation previously forced engineers to use rules of thumb, approximations and other methods to simplify the simulation to reduce computation. Designers often had to build and test physical prototypes to evaluate material handling and equipment behavior and then redesign, rebuild and retest in an iterative cycle until they achieved the required performance.
Users can now evaluate performance, durability and efficiency of the operation for nearly any scenario and environment with these tools. As FunctionBay CEO Michael Jang explained, “Our partnership with EDEM means our RecurDyn users can get access to an accurate representation of the loads and forces acting on equipment. This capability brings greater insight into equipment performance and results in increased design accuracy and reduced prototyping costs.”
Engineers can perform previously impractical what-if analysis with the new tools. Developers optimized algorithms, applied high performance computing methods using CPUs and GPUs and enhanced the solver and analysis tools to improve performance and enable more complex simulations. These performance enhancements mitigated the computational constraints enough to finally allow accurate and realistic modeling of the behavior of bulk materials interacting with heavy equipment. While physical prototypes may still be needed, the number of iterative design cycles is reduced and potentially limited to a single verification prototype.
Engineers can simulate and model behavior of any machine or process that interacts with bulk materials. Examples include off-road vehicles driven on sand dunes, conveyors to move gravel and stone, grain storage and processing facilities as well heavy equipment such as excavators and bulldozers.