Bonded contact models have been increasingly used in the discrete element method (DEM) to study cemented and sintered particulate materials in recent years. Several popular DEM bond models have been proposed in the literature; thus it is beneficial to assess the similarities and differences between the different bond models before they are used in simulations. This paper identifies and discusses two fundamental types of bond models: the Spring Bond Model where two bonded particles are joined by a set of uniform elastic springs on the bond’s cross-section, and the Beam Bond Model in which a beam is used to connect the centres of two particles.

With increasing train speed and wheel axle load, severe vibrations can occur in a ballasted trackbed, thereby accelerating the degradation of the ballast particles and ultimately causing excessive settlement. To gain insights into the long-term trackbed behavior and the ballast degradation evolution, a full-scale ballasted track experiment with eight sleepers was designed and tested on a validated physical model test platform (ZJU-iHSRT).

Discrete Element Method (DEM) simulations have the potential to provide particle-scale understanding of twin-screw granulators. This is difficult to obtain experimentally because of the closed, tightly confined geometry. An essential prerequisite for successful DEM modelling of a twin-screw granulator is making the simulations tractable, i.e., reducing the significant computational cost while retaining the key physics.

VELaSSCo (Visualization for Extremely Large-Scale Scientific Computing) is a platform developed to provide new visual analysis methods for large-scale simulations serving the petabyte era. The platform adopts Big Data tools/architectures to enable in-situ processing for analytics of engineering and scientific data and hardware-accelerated interactive visualization.

An adhesive elasto-plastic contact model for the discrete element method with three dimensional non-spherical particles is proposed and investigated to achieve quantitative prediction of cohesive powder flowability.

Experimental characterisation and numerical modelling of iron ore fines. A new adhesive contact model (EEPA model) is developed and used to simulate cohesive iron ore fines and numerically investigate cohesive silo discharge.