Direct simulations on 2D mold-filling processes of particle-filled fluids

We present a direct simulation technique for two-dimensional mold-filling simulations of fluids filled with a large number of circular disk-like rigid particles. It is a direct simulation in that the hydrodynamic interaction between particles and fluid is fully considered. We employ a pseudo-concentration method for the evolution of the flow front and the DLM (distributed Lagrangian multipliers)-like fictitious domain method for the implicit treatment of the hydrodynamic interaction. Both methods allow the use of a fixed regular discretization during the entire computation. The discontinuous Galerkin method has been used to solve the concentration evolution equation and the rigid-ring description has been introduced for freely suspended particles. A buffer zone, the gate region of a finite area subject to the uniform velocity profile, has been introduced to put discrete particles into the computational domain avoiding any artificial discontinuity. From example problems of 450 particles, we investigated the particle motion and effects of particles on the flow for both Newtonian and shear-thinning fluid media. We report the prolonged particle movement toward the wall in case of a shear-thinning fluid, which has been interpreted with the shear rate distribution.