[thinktank]

Hii..
I am trying to model the flow of a spherical particle through a 3d spiral channel. What I am essentially interested in is to find out the location of the particle. There is a steady flow of fluid from the inlet at the center of the spiral to the outlet on the outer circumference of the spiral. The channel has a structure as shown in the figure attached. I have earlier tried using COMSOL moving mesh, but it took a huge time to using moving mesh, and it also caused a lot of problem when the particle approached the wall. So I am thinking of using the Volume of Fluid method implemented in Fluent to compute the position of the particle. I was thinking of modeling the solid particle by assuming it to be a fluid particle like a bubble, except that it has a very high viscosity (so as to have a no slip boundary condition on the surface, and so that the shape of the particle has minimal deformation).

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/299FDOVeMHS3BS-7FXgJfw?feat=directlink

However while going through the manual and help files, I found that there are other methods implemented in Fluent which might be able to do the same thing with less effort, such as the discrete phase model, mixture model and eulerian model. Since I am new to Fluent, I was wondering if I could get some suggestion on which method would be most suitable for the problem at hand.
Thanks a lot for your help.