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arXiv · 1704.01219

Modeling granular material blending in a rotating drum using a finite element method and advection-diffusion equation multi-scale model

Yu Liu·Marcial Gonzalez·Carl Wassgren
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Abstract

A multi-scale model is presented for predicting the magnitude and rate of powder blending in a rotating drum blender. The model combines particle diffusion coefficient correlations from the literature with advective flow field information from blender finite element method simulations. The multi-scale model predictions for overall mixing and local concentration variance closely match results from discrete element method (DEM) simulations for a rotating drum, but take only hours to compute as opposed to taking days of computation time for the DEM simulations. Parametric studies were performed using the multi-scale model to investigate the influence of various parameters on mixing behavior. The multi-scale model is expected to be more amenable to predicting mixing in complex geometries and scale more efficiently to industrial-scale blenders than DEM simulations or analytical solutions.

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Yu Liu, Marcial Gonzalez, Carl Wassgren. 2017-04-04. Modeling granular material blending in a rotating drum using a finite element method and advection-diffusion equation multi-scale model. https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.01219

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