A fast and efficient tool to study the rheology of dense suspensions

Abstract

A cutting-edge software that adopts an optimized searching algorithm is presented to tackle the Newton-Euler equations governing the dynamics of dense suspensions in Newtonian fluids. In particular, we propose an implementation of a fixed-radius near neighbors search based on an efficient counting sort algorithm with an improved symmetric search. The adopted search method drastically reduces the computational cost and allows an efficient parallelization even on a single node through the multi-threading paradigm. Emphasis is also given to the memory efficiency of the code since the history of the contacts among particles has to be traced to model the frictional contributions, when dealing with dense suspensions of rheological interest that consider non-smooth interacting particles. An effective procedure based on an estimate of the maximum number of the smallest particles surrounding the largest one (given the radii distribution) and a sort applied only to the surrounding particles only is implemented, allowing us to effectively tackle the rheology of non-monodispersed particles with a high size-ratio in large domains. Finally, we present validations and verification of the numerical procedure, by comparing with previous simulations and experiments, and present new software capabilities.