Influence of the gravity on the discharge of a silo

Abstract

We performed a series of experiments to investigate the flow of an assembly of non-cohesive spherical grains in both high and low gravity conditions (i.e. above and under the Earth’s gravity). In high gravity conditions, we studied the flow of glass beads out of a cylindrical silo and the flow of metallic beads out of a vertical Hele-Shaw rectangular silo. Both silos were loaded in one of the gondolas of the large diameter centrifuge facility (located at ESTEC) in which an apparent gravity up to 20 times the Earth’s gravity can be established. To simulate low gravity conditions, we submitted a horizontal monolayer of metallic beads to the centrifuge force of a small rotation device (located at University of Liege). The influences of both gravity and aperture size on the mass flow were analysed in these various conditions. For the three systems (cylindrical silo, the Hele-shaw silo and the monolayer of beads), we demonstrated that (i) the square root scaling of the gravity found by Beverloo is relevant and (ii) the critical aperture size below which the flow is jammed does not significantly increase with the apparent gravity. Moreover, we studied in more details the Hele-Shaw silo in high gravity because this configuration allowed to determine local properties of the flow at the level of the aperture. We measured the velocity profiles and the packing fraction profiles for the various aperture sizes and apparent high gravities. We demonstrate the existence of a slip length for the flow at the level of the aperture. This later fact seems to result from the geometrical configuration of the silo.