The Comparative Study of Two Frictional Theories for Monodisperse and Polydisperse Granular Flow From a Hopper

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the granular material discharge from a hopper. For this study was used the modification of a frictional-kinetic model for the gas-particle flow proposed by Srivastava and Sundaresan [1] (S-S model) and compared it with the frictional model proposed by Syamlal et al. [2] (S-R-O model). The numerical simulations were performed using the source code MFIX (Multiphase Flow with Interphase eXchange) [2] developed at NETL (“National Energy Technology Laboratory”). The two frictional flow theories were studied for both monodisperse and polydisperse granular flow. For polydisperse flow, two different particle diameters were used, 0.05 cm and 0.1 cm. The influence of the particle diameter was presented and discussed. The results obtained from the comparison of the two frictional models showed that the lower values of the discharge rate were computed using the S-R-O frictional model as compared to the S-S model predictions. This was expected due to the fundamental difference between these two frictional models.