“…The streamers are modelled using the discrete element method (DEM) and the flow field is computed using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The DEM was initially developed to study mechanics of granular like materials (Gu et al, 2016;Schrader et al, 2019;Sun et al, 2017) and has been recently extended to investigate mechanics of living materials such as biofilms (Jayathilake et al, 2017(Jayathilake et al, , 2019Li et al, 2019), cells and tissues (Elvitigala et al, 2018;Kleinstreuer & Xu, 2018). The present model was implemented on SediFoam (https://github.com/xiaoh/sediFoam) which is an open source CFD-DEM tool kit based on large-scale atomic/molecular massively parallel simulator (LAMMPS; Plimpton, 1993) and Opensource Field Operation and Manipulation (OpenFOAM;Greenshields, 2017).…”