OpenHFDIB-DEM: An extension to OpenFOAM for CFD-DEM simulations with arbitrary particle shapes

Fluid flows containing dispersed particles are abundant in both nature and industry. Simulating such flows, especially with high volumetric fractions of the dispersed solid phase, is challenging due to the complexity of solid–fluid and solid–solid interactions. In this paper, we introduce OpenHFDIB-DEM, an open-source software that couples computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with hybrid fictitious domain immersed boundary method (HFDIB) and discrete element method (DEM). The software is developed as an extension of the OpenFOAM library. The main contribution lies in a custom DEM implementation that is fully integrated in the OpenFOAM framework and allows for CFD-DEM simulations of various flows with arbitrarily shaped solids defined by triangulated surfaces in stereolithographic (STL) format.