2005 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
The Global Property of the Dilute-to-Dense Transition of Granular Flows in a 2D Channel
Authors : M. Hou, W. Chen1, Z. Peng, T. Zhang, K. Lu, C.K. Chan
Published in: Traffic and Granular Flow ’03
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
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The dilute-to-dense transition of granular flow of particle size
d
0
is studied experimentally in a two dimensional channel (width
D
) with confined exit (width
d
). It is found that there exists a maximum inflow rate
Q
c
, above which the outflow changes from dilute to dense and the outflow rate
Q
(
t
) drops abruptly from
Q
c
to a dense flow rate
Q
d
. The re-scaled critical rate
$$ D/d_0 $$
is found to be a function of a scaling variable
λ
only, i.e.
q
c
∼
F
(
λ
), and
$$ \lambda \equiv \frac{d} {{d_0 }}\frac{d} {{D - d}} $$
. This form of
λ
suggests that the dilute-to-dense transition is a global property of the flow; unlike the jamming transition, which depends only on
$$ \frac{d} {{d_0 }} $$
. The transition is found to occur when the area fraction of particles near the exit reaches a critical value 0.65±0.03.