(457j) Measuring and Simulation of the Concentration Profile of Binary Mixtures of Powders When Flowing between Flat Plates with Rough Surfaces

In recent years, there has been a great interest in understanding the behavior of granular materials as they are used in industry in many engineering processes such as mixing. To obtain a perfect powder mixing it is necessary to understand the flow behavior of particles which is done using concepts of fluid flow that include mass and momentum balances with constitutive equations containing such material characteristic as friction angle and particle density. The objective of this project is to simulate the concentration profile of the combination of two powders to predict the degree of mixing when generating flow of powder between flat plates with rough surfaces. To achieve it, a new term in the constitutive equation will be used which is the interparticle force between the particles of the different components and then by means of the theory of mixture or theory of interacting continua with the governing equations, the entire system will be modeled. This simulation will be compared with the results found with another method of simulation that use Discrete Element Method and with the results acquired with experimental data obtained when mixing two different powders in an open box with movable walls. Preliminary experiments run with the same mixing time for different distribution of particle sizes have been done and the behavior of the flow has been different in each of them causing different degrees of mixing. This kind of behavior that depends of the characteristic of the materials will be explained at the end of this study.