Discharge of rice-shaped particles from a monolayer flat-bottom silo.

Abstract

In this work, we performed experiments regarding the outflow of spheres and two different types of rice-shaped particles in a quasi-two-dimensional monolayer silo with a flat bottom. We investigate the velocity and solid fraction profiles at the orifice and test whether the profiles for nonspherical particles have similar self-similar properties as in the spherical case. We find that the magnitude and shape of the velocity profiles for all three particle types are in a similar range. In contrast, the solid fraction at the orifice has a dome-shaped profile for both rice particles, whereas the profile for spherical particles is rather flat. The discharge rate determined from the velocity and solid fraction profiles describes the independently measured experimental discharge rate very well for all three investigated particle types.