Abstract:
The Discrete Element Method (DEM) simulation of charge motion in ball, semi-autogenous (SAG) and
autogenous mills has advanced to a stage where the effects of lifter design, power draft and product size
can be evaluated with sufficient accuracy using either two-dimensional (2D) or three-dimensional (3D)
codes. While 2D codes may provide a reasonable profile of charge distribution in the mill there is a
difference in power estimations as the anisotropic nature within the mill cannot be neglected. Thus 3D
codes are preferred as they can provide a more accurate estimation of power draw and charge
distribution. While 2D codes complete a typical industrial simulation in the order of hours, 3D codes
require computing times in the order of days to weeks on a typical multi-threaded desktop computer.
A newly developed and recently introduced 3D DEM simulation environment is BLAZE-DEM that utilizes
the Graphical Processor Unit (GPU) via the NVIDIA CUDA programming model. Utilizing the parallelism of
the GPU a 3D simulation of an industrial mill with four million particles takes 1 h to simulate one second
(20 FPS) on a GTX 880 laptop GPU. This new performance level may allow 3D simulations to become a
routine task for mill designers and researchers. This paper makes two notable extensions to the
BLAZE-DEM environment. Firstly, the sphere-face contact is extended to include a GPU efficient
sphere-edge contact strategy. Secondly, the world representation is extended by an efficient representation
of convex geometrical primitives that can be combined to form non-convex world boundaries that
drastically enhances the efficiency of particle world contact. In addition to these extensions this paper
verifies and validates our GPU code by comparing charge profiles and power draw obtained using the
CPU based code Millsoft and pilot scale experiments. Finally, we conclude with plant scale mill
simulations.
