(536e) Effect of Particle Size Distribution and Weight of Powders in Mixing of Granular Materials Under Periodic Shear

In this decade, the study of flow and mixing of granular materials had an exponential increase compared to the last decades. The advance has been noticeable in both computational and experimental studies. However, because of the large amount of factors that govern mixing and flow behavior, they continue being moderately understood. In this work, a new low shear mixing device consisting of a box with two moving walls and three static walls was developed to study granular mixing. The goal was to obtain a more in depth understanding of the internal behavior of granular material in the three dimensions when particle size distribution, imposed rate of strain, and initial filling height of the powders are changed. Results expose that the faster mixing is found when using particles of high diameter. The trend of mixing in the superficial layer differ extremely to the found in the bottom of the mixing chamber where a triangular pattern was obtained and whose size depended on the imposed strain rate, weight of the powders and particle diameter. The phenomenon of dilation was remarked varying the expansion of the bed linearly with the particle size