The Experiment of the Clog Reduction in a Plane Silo

¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China 200240
² Institute of Natural Sciences, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China 200240

^* e-mail: jiezhang2012@sjtu.edu.cn

Published online: 30 June 2017

Abstract

The flow of particles may be clogged when they pass through a narrow orifice. Many factors can change the probability of clogging, such as the outlet size, the presence of obstacles and external perturbation, but the detailed mechanisms are still unclear. In this paper, we present an experimental study of reduction of the clogging probability in a horizontal plane silo, which consists of a layer of elastic particles transported on an annular flat plate rotating with a constant angular velocity passing through a hopper structure. We found the exponential distributions of the avalanche size for different sizes of orifice and the power law tails of the passing time between two particles. We did not confirm whether there was a critical size of orifice above which the clogging became impossible. We explored the effect of the obstacle on the probability of clogging: and if we chose a proper obstacle placed at a proper position, the probability of clogging could be reduced by a factor of about seven.