The DEM-based digital design platform for agricultural machinery—agriDEM

Abstract

In order to overcome the shortcomings of agricultural machinery development such as the development cycle is long and the workload is heavy, a DEM-based digital design platform for agricultural machinery—AgriDEM is designed and implemented. This platform can simulate, analyze and evaluate the working process of agricultural machinery through integrating CAD with a self-developed calculation software that base on the coupling of DEM-CFD-MBK (Discrete Element Method, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Multi-body Kinematics), thus, the structure and dimensional parameter can be optimized in the design phase. The architecture of this platform is described in detail in this paper. Also, the implementation methods of the key technologies including the modeling method of particle and boundary analysis model, the parallel computing method based on OpenMP, the module encapsulation method based on DLL and the development method of prototype system are introduced. Finally, the feasibility and the effectiveness of this platform are confirmed through the given testing instance.