Influence of particle size in silo discharge

Abstract

Recently Janda et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 248001 (2012)] reported an experimental study where it was measured the velocity and volume fraction fields of 1 mm diameter stainless steel beads in the exit of a two-dimensional silo. In that work, they proposed a new expression to predict the flow of granular media in silos which does not explicitly include the particle size as a parameter. Here, we study if effectively, there is not such influence of the particle size in the flux equations as well as investigate any possible effect in the velocity and volume fraction fields. To this end, we have performed high speed motion measurements of these magnitudes in a two-dimensional silo filled with 4 mm diameter beads of stainless steel, the same material than the previous works. A developed tracking program has been implemented to obtain at the same time both, the velocity and volume fraction. The final objective of this work has been to extend and generalize the theoretical framework of Janda et al. for all sizes of particles. We have found that the obtained functionalities are the same than in the 1 mm case, but the exponents and other fitting parameters are different.