On the use of magnetic particles to enhance the flow of vibrated grains through narrow apertures

MADRID, MARCOS A.; KUPERMAN, MARCELO N; CARLEVARO, C. MANUEL; PUGNALONI, LUIS A.; BOUZAT, SEBASTIÁN

GRANULAR MATTER

SPRINGER

Lugar: Berlin; Año: 2022 vol. 24 p. 51 - 60

1434-7636

The flow of grains through narrow apertures possess an extraordinary challenge: clogging. Strategies to alleviate the effectof clogging, such as the use of external vibration or addition of smaller grains, are always part of the design of machineryfor the handling of bulk materials. In this work, we study with numerical simulations the effect of adding self-repellingmagnetic particles to a sample of grains. We consider a vibrated two-dimensional hopper with a small orifice through whichdisks flow and clog intermittently. We find that the magnetic repulsion has a second order effect in comparison with theeffect of the size of the added grains. Small added grains ease the flow of the original species. However, when the magneticrepulsion is switched on for the added small grains their ?lubricating? effect is usually lessened. Only for a narrow range ofsizes of the added particles we observe a subtle improvement of flow rate of the original particles with magnetic repulsion