Since life-threatening natural phenomena, such as, snow avalanches and lava flows, and many industrial and agricultural material handling processes may be classified as granular flows, establishing constitutive relationships which model granular flow behaviour is of prime importance. While laboratory experiments attempting to support granular flow theory have been plagued by poor instrumentation, numerical simulations are becoming increasingly helpful in understanding the nature of these flows. The present investigation describes such a simulation developed within the framework of the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo model for rarefied gases presented in Bird (1976) and granular flow kinetic theory according to Lun, et al. (1984). More specifically, the model generates a Couette flow of smooth, inelastic, homogeneous, spherical granular particles. Two different boundary condition models are used to model the flow field's upper and lower boundaries: the Periodic Boundary Condition (PBC) model and the Finite Shear Layer (FSL) model. An essentially uniform shear flow with virtually no slip at the boundaries results from both boundary conditions. Stress and granular temperature results obtained with the PBC and FSL models for the lower range of solids fractions ($ nu < 0.3)$ compare very well with the Lun, et al. (1984) theory. At higher solids fractions, while the total stresses generated with both boundary models are in reasonable agreement with the latter theory and results from other numerical work, higher than expected streaming stresses appear to be compensating for lower than expected collisional stresses; as a result, granular temperature in this range of solids fractions proves to be higher than predicted.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.60433 |
| Date | January 1990 |
| Creators | Basik, Beata-Marie |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Engineering (Department of Civil Engineering and Applied Mechanics.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001226213, proquestno: AAIMM67571, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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