DEM study of granular flow around blocks attached to inclined walls

¹ Laboratory for Simulation and Modeling of Particulate Systems, Department of Chemical Engineering, Monash University, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia
² Iron and Steelmaking Technology, BlueScope Ltd., P.O. Box 202, Port Kembla, NSW 2505, Australia
³ ARC Research Hub for Australian Steel Manufacturing

^* Corresponding author: joel.samsu@monash.edu

Published online: 30 June 2017

Abstract

Damage due to intense particle-wall contact in industrial applications can cause severe problems in industries such as mineral processing, mining and metallurgy. Studying the flow dynamics and forces on containing walls can provide valuable feedback for equipment design and optimising operations to prolong the equipment lifetime. Therefore, solids flow-wall interaction phenomena, i.e. induced wall stress and particle flow patterns should be well understood. In this work, discrete element method (DEM) is used to study steady state granular flow in a gravity-fed hopper like geometry with blocks attached to an inclined wall. The effects of different geometries, e.g. different wall angles and spacing between blocks are studied by means of a 3D DEM slot model with periodic boundary conditions. The findings of this work include (i) flow analysis in terms of flow patterns and particle velocities, (ii) force distributions within the model geometry, and (iii) wall stress vs. model height diagrams. The model enables easy transfer of the key findings to other industrial applications handling granular materials.