Modelling and Characterisation of Granular Material Flow

Granular materials are very common both in nature and in industry, and their extensive use means that there are financial incentives for increased efficiency. There are huge costs related to their use and handling, which is a major motivation for increased knowledge of the behaviour of granular materials at different loading conditions. The development of tools for numerical simulation of granular materials at diverse flow conditions gives the opportunity to study and optimise various industrial processes. In order for such tools to be trustworthy, calibration and validation against experimental results is essential. Thus, experimental methods for accurate measurement and characterisation of granular material flow are required. The objective of this thesis is to contribute to the knowledge of experimental characterisation and numerical modelling of non-cohesive, dry granular materials, at dissimilar flow conditions. In order to fulfil this objective, an experimental method, able to capture the flow behaviour of granular materials is developed. The method is based on the digital image correlation technique, and it is used for field measurements of displacement and velocity. The devised method is used to obtain field measurements for the flow of sand, tungsten carbide powder and potassium chloride. For modelling and simulation, the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method, and a pressure-dependent, elastic-plastic constitutive model are used. In this thesis, experimental characterisation and numerical modelling of granular material flow is performed in a number of applications. An experimental powder filling rig is used to study the flow during filling of sand into a die. A high-speed digital camera is used to record the flow, and the digital image correlation technique is used to obtain field measurements during the filling. This method is also applied in another experimental setup, where flow during filling of spherical tungsten carbide powder into a die is studied. The filling of tungsten carbide powder is simulated using the SPH method, and the results are compared to the field measurements with good agreement. Furthermore, the flow of potassium chloride is studied experimentally in the collapse of a granular column and in the discharge from a flat bottomed silo. The material flow process in both the column collapse and silo discharge are simulated using the SPH method. The results from simulations are found to be in agreement with observations reported in literature, and with experimental measurements obtained in this work. In conclusion, an experimental method for characterising granular material flow through field measurements is presented. The method is used to support the exploration of numerical tools for modelling and simulation of granular material flow. Furthermore, the high accuracy field measurements are used for improved calibration and validation of numerical methods. Reliable numerical simulations allows for study of the mechanisms that are present during granular material flow, mechanisms that might be hard or even impossible to investigate experimentally. The work within the present thesis contributes to the knowledge of both experimental characterisation and numerical modelling of granular material flow