Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability

In this work a multibody collision model, amenable to large-scale computation, is developed to simulate material removal with particulate flows. This model is developed by computing momentum exchange to account for different force interactions: (1) particle–particle interaction, (2) particle–fluid interaction, and (3) particle–surface interaction. For the particle-fluid interaction, a velocity field for the fluid is assumed to be known, and the drag force on the particles is computed from this field. In the particle–surface interaction, the Boussinesq solution for a point load on an elastic half-space is used along with the von-Mises yield criterion to determine the amount of material removed. Employing thismodel, inverse problems are then constructed where combinations of the abrasive particle size, the particle size distribution, the flow velocity, etc., are sought to maximize the efficiency of the process. A genetic algorithm is used to treat this inverse problem, and numerical examples are given to illustrate the overall approach.