On DEM Contact Model for Non-Spherical Solids but Consistent With Hertz Model for Spheres

To enable high-fidelity and physically relevant simulations of non-spherical suspensions, we aim to design a solver coupling computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with the discrete element method (DEM).The CFD part of the solver is based on the widely used OpenFOAM library.However, to design a robust and computationally efficient DEM for non-spherical particles is still an open problem, as the contact solution is, in this case, nontrivial.In this contribution, we propose an updated formulation of a DEM contact model for non-spherical particles that is (i) based on the concept of overlap volume, (ii) robust, and (iii) for the case of spheres, consistent with the standard Hertz-Mindlin model.The presented model is successfully verified against LIGGGHTS on a DEM benchmark test.