Particle behaviors of printing system using GPU-based discrete element method

Abstract

Generally, Discrete element method (DEM) has been used to analyze the two-component particles behavior in the printing systems. DEM makes it possible to figure out the particle-related complicated phenomena. Nevertheless, DEM has a serious problem that the computation time of the number of particles spends too much time. It has been still considered to be unsuitable method for a real product design tool due to an extremely large computation time. Therefore, we have developed a DEM based simulation tool for the two-component particles. It is applicable to the real product design problems such as a behavior analysis of the toner particles in the electrophotographic process and a GPU based parallel computing method was employed to maximize the computation performance. In the electro-photographic process, we simulated the developer mixing behavior in the agitation process of two-component systems and the two-component development process. The results of the simulations were well matched with experimental results, with less than 15% errors.