Effect of Wall Friction on 2D Hopper Flow

TL;DR

This study investigates how wall friction influences the flow rate and particle dynamics in 2D hoppers, revealing that increased wall friction alters scaling laws and acceleration patterns, with distinct behaviors compared to 3D cases.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the role of wall friction in 2D hopper flow, highlighting differences from 3D behavior and analyzing particle acceleration and velocity patterns.

Findings

Wall friction decreases the power-law exponent of flow rate scaling in 2D.

Flow rate remains nearly constant in 2D simulations even without wall friction.

Particle accelerations and velocities are significantly affected by wall friction levels.

Abstract

We report here on experiments and simulations examining the effect of changing wall friction on the gravity-driven flow of spherical particles in a vertical hopper. In 2D experiments and simulations, we observe that the exponent of the expected power-law scaling of mass flow rate with opening size (known as Beverloo's law) decreases as the coefficient of friction between particles and wall increases, whereas Beverloo scaling works as expected in 3D. In our 2D experiments, we find that wall friction plays the biggest role in a region near the outlet comparable in height to the largest opening size. However, wall friction is not the only factor determining a constant rate of flow, as we observe a near-constant mass outflow rate in the 2D simulations even when wall friction is set to zero. We show in our simulations that an increase in wall friction leaves packing fractions relatively unchanged, while average particle velocities become independent of opening size as the coefficient of friction increases. We track the spatial pattern of time-averaged particle velocities and accelerations inside the hopper. We observe that the hemisphere-like region above the opening where particles begin to accelerate is largely independent of opening size at finite wall friction. However, the magnitude of particle accelerations decreases significantly as wall friction increases, which in turn results in mean sphere velocities that no longer scale with opening size, consistent with our observations of mass flow rate scaling. The case of zero wall friction is anomalous, in that most of the acceleration takes place near the outlet.