Using Blender for solving real engineering problems
Behnam Partopour used Blender to research algorithms for ‘packing’ structures. The result has now been published.
Packed beds are widely used in different areas of the chemical industry such as reaction engineering and separation processes, and researchers from different disciplines such as chemical and mechanical engineering and material science are interested in studying them. Therefore, along with experimental methods, the numerical generation of these beds is extensively investigated. It is important for computer generated packed beds to have the physical properties of real structures. This structures traditionally have been generated by Discrete Element Method. However, in DEM for each new particle shape a new collision detection and force model is required. Furthermore, The DEM packages that can handle only a few particle shapes are very expensive to purchase. DEM simulations could also be extremely slow.
In Blender objects could be defined by surface mesh, and no matter how complex they are, the same collision and force models could be used for rigid-body dynamics simulation. Therefore, we developed python modules that generate different particle shapes and randomly place them on top of a container and let them drop due to gravity and collide with each other. Once all the particles settled down (system reached steady state) the simulations stops. We identified the right parameters (e.g. friction and restitution factors) for the simulations and measured the properties of the structures such as particles orientation distribution and radial voidage, and finally, validated our results with the experimental data and DEM simulations. It turned out that Blender generated structure could be as good as DEM packages. Another advantage of Blender is that users can export the geometries as STL files. This files could be used in various engineering codes such as Computational Fluid Dynamics and Structural analysis to study a specific problem. Not only we save a lot by not paying for those expensive packages, but now we have a more robust package to use.
The original paper is published in Powder Technology Journal.
Haha, academics. After years (maybe) they realized that DEM sims are too fancy for their use case and they can do this with simple rigid bodies! Next they will realize they can do this realtime on GPU with something else than Blender (or more accurately with Houdini). Must be a tough season if this makes a paper.. Made my day.
Very smart…….
just checked, Houdini uses bullet lib just like Blender. So phys sim should be the same.
Houdini can do finite element simulations. Accurate soft bodies accounting that no material is perfectly rigid. Rigid bodies are not that accurate, it’s more approximated. So Houdini would be more accurate than Blender.
The Blender program is the alternative program for engineers, I created a special program for designing the composite structures of for most materials.
Are you explain the technique of Meshing with shrink-wrap method handles contacts between non-spherical particles.