Static wall pressure distribution characteristics in horizontal silos

Abstract

The silos are mainly placed horizontally in the powder propellant feeding systems. However, most of the literatures only report the static wall pressure distribution of the vertical silos. In this paper, a FT4 powder rheometer was used to test the flow properties of the materials, and the wall pressure distribution in the test horizontal silo was investigated experimentally. A physical model based on Janssen theory is proposed to describe the wall pressure distribution characteristics effectively. Both experimental results and theoretical predictions show that the wall pressures at different positions of the same section are different, but all increase under the action of additional pressure and decay along the axial direction, indicating that the final axial pressure is close to zero. In addition, the increase of particle size also leads to the increase of wall pressure.