An experimental and numerical study of granular hopper flows
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Sandlin, Matthew
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Abstract
In a proposed design for a concentrated solar power tower, sand is irradiated by
solar energy and transfers its energy to another fluid stream by means of a finned tube
heat exchanger. To maximize heat transfer and minimize potential damage to the heat
exchanger, it is desired to have a very uniform flow through the heat exchanger.
However, performing full scale flow tests can be expensive, impractical, and depending
upon the specific quantities of interest, unsuitable for revealing the details of what it
happening inside of the flow stream.
Thus, the discrete element method has been used to simulate and study particulate
flows. In this project, the flow of small glass beads through a square pyramid shaped
hopper and a wedge shaped hopper were studied at the lab scale. These flows were also
simulated using computers running two versions of discrete element modeling software –
EDEM and LIGGGHTS. The simulated results were compared against the lab scale flows
and against each other. They show that, in general, the discrete element method can be
used to simulate lab scale particulate flows as long as certain material properties are well
known, especially the friction properties of the material. The potential for increasing the
accuracy of the simulations, such as using better material property data, non-uniform
particle size distributions, and non-spherical particle shapes, as well as simulating heat
transfer within a granular flow are also discussed.
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Date
2013-11-20
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