Intermittent Granular Flow and Clogging with Internal Avalanches

TL;DR

This study investigates the dynamics of intermittent granular flow and clogging in a 2D system, revealing power-law behaviors in grain displacements and outflow distributions for different hole sizes.

Contribution

It provides numerical evidence of self-organized steady states and power-law distributions in granular flow and clogging phenomena based on hole size.

Findings

Small holes lead to steady states with power-law displacement distributions.

Large holes exhibit power-law outflow distributions.

Clogging is associated with arch formation and intermittent flow patterns.

Abstract

The dynamics of intermittent granular flow through an orifice in a granular bin and the associated clogging due to formation of arches blocking the outlet, is studied numerically in two-dimensions. Our numerical results indicate that for small hole sizes, the system self-organizes to a steady state and the distribution of the grain displacements decays as power laws. On the other hand, for large holes, the outflow distributions are also observed to follow power law distributions.