Scaling of wet granular flows in a rotating drum

¹ Multi Scale Mechanics, CTW, MESA+, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands
² Department of Chemical and Process Engineering, University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom

^* Corresponding author: a.jarray@utwente.nl

Published online: 30 June 2017

Abstract

In this work, we investigate the effect of capillary forces and particle size on wet granular flows and we propose a scaling methodology that ensures the conservation of the bed flow. We validate the scaling law experimentally by using different size glass beads with tunable capillary forces. The latter is obtained using mixtures of ethanol-water as interstitial liquid and by increasing the hydrophobicity of glass beads with an ad-hoc silanization procedure. The scaling methodology in the flow regimes considered (slipping, slumping and rolling) yields similar bed flow for different particle sizes including the angle of repose that normally increases when decreasing the particle size.