MODELLING AND ANALYSIS OF POWDER FLOW DURING SHEARING IN ANNULAR RHEOMETER USING DISCRETE ELEMENT METHOD

Abstract

Due to the fact that Jenike's cell has been designed and used for testing powder materials under load of hundreds of kPa, characteristic for large-tonnage processes, it is an inappropriate tool for testing materials under load conditions well below 10 kPa. As an alternative, an annular cell rheometer test constructed in such a way that the shear band covers the entire volume of material tested is proposed. After the experimental tests, a computer simulation of powder shearing, based on the  discrete Element Method (DEM), was used to analyze timespatial distributions of experimentally unmeasurable physical properties of the powder bed. The simulation results proved that the shearing band covers entire rheometer gap.