What's New in EDEM 2024.1 – Release Highlights
Altair EDEM is available on Altair One and continues to prove its market leadership by setting the industry standard for the Discrete Element Method (DEM). Now more powerful and easier to use than ever - EDEM 2024.1 sees the addition of concave polyhedral particles enabling users to reproduce more complex physics when needed. On top of that, a new particle boundary condition allows for a simplified simulation set up. Finally, EDEM's unique powders database has been expanded by now including 15,000 new material models calibrated against the FT4 rheometer basic flowability energy measurement.

Here are some more details of the key highlights from this latest release.

Simulate All Polyhedral Particle Shapes
EDEM can now simulate all polyhedral particle shapes with the addition of concave polyhedral particles. This is another significant milestone for EDEM with the introduction of full support for concave shapes - all polyhedral particle shapes are fully supported and can be deployed in simulations alongside convex polyhedral, multi-sphere and sphero-cylinder particles. Particle shapes can be imported as CAD or pre-defined meshes (STL, OBJ, etc.) and must form a single closed volume, but no additional steps are required from the user.

Previously, there were applications where a more complex shape was required to accurately reproduce the interaction behavior with the equipment or process being simulated, and this was limited to only convex polyhedral shapes – now users have the choice to simulate a wider range of shapes on GPU where several advanced simulations can be achieved with complex shapes.

Utilizing EDEM’s intra-particle coating analysis capabilities, concave shapes such as “potato chips” can be simulated to optimize the appropriate distribution of the coating seasoning on the surface to improve end-product quality.
The main characteristic of this new capability is the unparalleled performance achieved! As an example of this, a 1 million particle simulation using a mid-range GPU (Nvidia Titan RTX) only requires 8.4GB of memory and less than 8 hours to run.

Simplified Workflow for Particle Kinematics
A new boundary condition (Rigid Link) to assign the velocity from a geometry section to a specified group of particles has been added for a simplified simulation set up. The Rigid Link condition can be applied when the particle is created, on contact with a specific geometry section, or at a pre-defined time.
This capability is ideal for attaching fibers, roots, brushes, etc to a moving or static geometry section. For example, when applying kinematics over particles for fixing brushes to a vehicle and transferring the geometry properties to the particle, like the street sweeper example shown here, or, for example in agriculture, when fixing crops to the ground / grasses to soil beds or fixing an electrode to the material bed for battery calendering.

What else?
Beyond these new capabilities and improvements, this release also brings some other important developments, including:
- Normal and lognormal distributions by Mass Fraction. This feature is designed to improve workflow when defining size distributions by mass. Previously the size distribution would have to be calculated externally to EDEM and then entered as a user-defined distribution, but now the distribution can be defined in the EDEM GUI.
- Export data in Analyst, now includes Variance and Standard Deviation as Queries Types for easier analysis, like mixing, and updated options to remove additional text in columns making easier to read and parse data with python scripts.
- EDEMpy updated to add better support for factories, EDEM API models and the format for setting parameters of physics models has been changed to be more consistent.

Altair EDEM is high-performance software for bulk and granular material simulation. Powered by state-of-the-art Discrete Element Modeling (DEM) technology, EDEM quickly and accurately simulates and analyzes the behavior of granular materials such as coal, mined ores, soils, fibers, grains, tablets, and powders. EDEM simulation provides engineers with crucial insight into how those materials will interact with their equipment during a range of operation and process conditions. EDEM is used for virtual testing of equipment that handles or processes bulk materials in the mining, equipment manufacturing and process industries. Companies worldwide use EDEM to optimize equipment design, increase productivity, reduce operational costs, shorten product development cycles and drive product innovation.
Altair EDEM 2024 includes many important updates and improvements. Central to this release, we have made great progress by delivering key updates to the leading ‘Tavares UFRJ model’ for particle breakage applications, providing a more realistic behavior representation for mineral processing equipment design in the mining industry. In addition, we have made important improvements to the new model for particle-based paste material (‘Hydrodynamic Lubrication model’) benefitting battery manufacturing, electronics, and pharmaceuticals. Other improvements include EDEMpy now supports Continuum Analysis Data, the updated export for SimSolid will improve the 1-way coupling for structural analysis, and the EDEM Coupling Library has been updated to improve functionality and performance when integrating EDEM with other CAE software, with special emphasis on CFD-DEM coupling, plus more.

Owner: Altair
Product Name: EDEM
Version: 2024.1 Professional
Supported Architectures: x64
Website Home Page : www.altairhyperworks.com
Languages Supported: english