The ‘miniature silo’ test: A simple experimental setup to estimate the effective friction coefficient between the granular solid and a horizontally-corrugated cylindrical metal silo wall

Abstract

Corrugated walls are widely employed in the construction of metal silos. Despite the long history of testing to establish bulk material parameters for silo design, there does not appear to be an established test procedure to directly determine the effective friction coefficient for a corrugated wall other than an adaptation of a classical direct shear test. EN 1991-4: 2006 prescribes a simple weighted average formula for this coefficient based on the internal friction angle of the granular solid and a ‘flat’ wall friction coefficient. This paper describes a set of miniature-scale silo tests performed at the University of Bologna intended to establish a simple but useful procedure to directly estimate an average global friction coefficient between the granular solid and a corrugated silo wall. These ‘miniature silo’ tests are simple enough to be performed in any civil engineering laboratory with standard equipment. • Particle-wall friction coefficient is fundamental for structural design of silos. • No tests are available to measure the effective friction for a corrugated wall. • A novel straightforward experimental test is proposed to fill this gap. • The miniature-silo test can be built using basic tools easy to be found in any lab. • The obtained results are in accordance with EN-1991-4 average formula predictions.