Effects of material properties on granular flow in a silo using DEM simulation

In order to test the effect of material properties oil flowability of particulate In order to test the of materials, discharge procedures of spherical particles within a flat-bottomed model silo with three sets of material properties, i.e., soft and hard without adhesion and adhesive hard, were simulated using the Discrete Element Method. For each system, three particles on the center line. were selected and their instant vertical velocity components were traced. In addition, both discharge and the rate were recorded throughout the procedure. The predicted results show that, for both the systems without adhesion, though the soft has a material modulus only 1/1000 of the hard, there are no significant differences inflow pattern and discharge rate. This suggests that a soft system can be used to predict the behavior of a hard one to save CPU time in a gravity-driven granular flow. On the other hand, comparison between both hard systems shows that adhesion can significantly reduce the flowability ill granular flow. By analyzing the velocity plot for the traced particles, free fall was clearly detected above the decompression zone, indicating the motion of a particle in a granular flow call be resolved as free fall together with the movement due to particle collision. In addition, select dynamic behavior related to the kinetic fluctuations affecting flow was observed.