Optimal and effective technique for particle packing

Abstract

In various fields ranging from manufacturing or pharmaceutical industry to agriculture or automotive industry air filters and -dryers filled with porous desiccant media are used for industrial air preparation. It is necessary to increase the mass of particulate material filled into the dryer for improving its efficiency. Practically this means decreasing porosity of the filler media. In order to achieve this, mechanical excitation (ensured by a vibration platform) is commonly used. However, applying outer excitation decreases the efficiency of filling procedure because of the high energy consumption of the vibratory device. To avoid unnecessary energy consumption it is recommended to examine the possibility of filling more particles into the canister without outer excitation. According to this in our present paper the gravitational deposition of particulate materials was investigated from viewpoint of porosity. Main idea of this research was the usage of the so called “snowstorm” filling technique. A conical hopper and under this multiple cylindrical rods were used to reach uniform deposition and high value of particle packing density. Thus efficiency of air preparation units may be increased as it is possible to fill more material into the container without additional energy usage compared to normal gravitational deposition.