Abstract
The ultimate goal of the IFPRI Round Robin is to develop an industry standard Best Practice for
the application of discrete element method (DEM) simulations to industrial process equipment. In
order to develop such a Best Practice, we are working alongside a number of companies spanning
several industrial sectors with a shared interest in modelling and thus predicting the dynamics
of particulate systems. Each company involved in the project has been charged with producing
a set of simulations modelling two distinct experimental set-ups, each chosen due to its direct
industrial relevance, under a variety of conditions. The simulations produced will be compared
to detailed experimental data produced using the University of Birmingham’s Positron Emission
Particle Tracking (PEPT) facility, allowing a rigorous, quantitative assessment of the degree to
which the simulations methods employed are capable of recreating the systems’ true dynamics.
This comparative analysis, supplemented by additional data provided by the team at the University
of Birmingham, will provide the central pillar of the aforementioned Best Practice document. In
this Report, we outline the progress made so far – including the development of novel analysis
software for the comparison of PEPT and DEM data, and preliminary results regarding the main
e.ects of various key DEM parameters – and map our course for the remainder of the project.