A combined TLBM-IBM-DEM scheme for simulating isothermal particulate flow in fluid

A combined Thermal Lattice Boltzmann Method (TLBM) - Immersed Boundary Method (IBM) - Discrete Element Method (DEM) scheme was proposed to simulate fluid-particle multiphase flows with heat transfer. The coupling scheme could be regarded as a natural next step of our recent work (Zhang et al., 2014). Here, we enabled an additional function to treat heat transfer problems based on the original LBM-IBM-DEM scheme without introducing any artificial parameters. Firstly, sedimentation of one and two isothermal particles in fluid was numerically investigated, respectively. The feature of instantaneous temperature distribution was captured. The effect of thermal buoyancy on the particle behavior was discussed. Obtained numerical results showed good agreements with previous studies. Then, another two cases involving a large number of isothermal particles were further implemented to demonstrate the capability of current coupling scheme. The numerical results revealed that the TLBM-IBM-DEM is a promising scheme for the solution of complex fluid-particle interaction problems with heat transfer.