Numerical Simulation of Granular Materials Based on Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH)

Granular flows play an important role in many industrial processes. To optimize these processes, it is necessary to simulate the flow accurately. However, due to the complexity of the granular flows, there is no generally accepted theory or computational method at the present. This paper presents a new numerical approach based on the smoothed particle hydrodynamics method (SPH) to simulate granular materials, which are assumed to be elasto-plastic. Herein, the Drucker-Prager model with non-associated plastic flow rule was employed to describe elasto-plastic behavior of granular flows, and the accuracy of SPH approximation of governing equation is improved by adopting a procedure to renormalize the kernel derivative. Application of SPH to simulate granular flow in a silo was presented after a validation of SPH with experiment. It is shown that the current SPH model can capture overall behavior of granular flows.