Some FEM-DEM coupling attempts

FEM and DEM are well-known for studying structural analysis and behavior of granular materials, respectively. There are some special cases that we wish to combine the two methods to profit all the strong points from both methods. Here  are a list of what I’ve found till the writing time of this blog post.

1. YADE – OOFEM

YADE is pretty well-known in Europe as an open-source DEM tool, written in C++ and PYTHON, and OOFEM is a FEM tool (latest version is 2017).

2. YADE – ESYS

Also from YADE document page, the link between FEM-DEM has been made using these two tools.

Very basic at the moment, lacks some serious development.

3. EDEM – ABAQUS

From version 2018, EDEM shows some supports for porting to ABAQUS. To some academic members, ABAQUS is their favorite numerical tool to do structural analysis.

4. YADE – COMSOL

There is a module developed by University of Ottawa, Canada to couple FEM-DEM using YADE and COMSOL based on JAVA linking.