Flow behavior of granular material during funnel and mixed flow discharges: A comparative analysis

Abstract The drainage of granular assembly from a flat-bottomed silo can be in either funnel flow mode or mixed flow mode. The primary motivation of this work is to investigate whether there exist fundamental differences between the rheological behavior of particles under these two discharge modes. The developments and evolutions of flowing zone and also the characteristics of particle velocity fluctuation during funnel and mixed flow discharges were analyzed and compared by performing 3D Discrete Element Method (DEM) simulations. For funnel flow discharge, the characteristic width of flowing zone at the early discharge state presented a clear history-dependent feature. For mixed flow discharge, the flowing zone sharply shrunk when the upper free surface of the material approached a critical height and the discharge mode then shifted to funnel flow mode. Discrete Fourier transform results demonstrate that resonant motion of particles appeared during both funnel and mixed flow discharges. The correlation analyses indicate that for these two flow modes, there both existed an intermediate region in the converging part of the flowing zone. Its upper boundary located at the position where the flowing zone started to converge along the vertical direction and was featured as the maximum particle compressive force. And its bottom boundary corresponded to the location of free-fall arch and acted as the source of the resonant motion of particles. Our simulation results thus suggest that from the perspective of particle velocity fluctuation, there is no essential difference between granular flows under funnel and mixed discharge modes.