Luis Guillermo Obregon Quiñones, Chemical Engineering, University of Puerto Rico, P.O.Box 5997, Mayaguez P.R. 00681-5997, Mayaguez, PR 00681 and Carlos Velázquez Figueroa, Chemical Engineering, ERC, Center for Structured Organic Composites, University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez Campus, P.O.Box 5997, Mayaguez P.R. 00681-5997, Mayaguez, PR 00681.
The interest in understanding the behavior of granular materials has been growing as they are extensively used in industry in many engineering processes such as mixing, which is the focus of this study. It is necessary to understand the flow behavior of particles to then understand the phenomenon of powder mixing. This can be done using concepts of fluid flow that include mass and momentum balances with constitutive equations containing material characteristics such as friction angle, repose angle, particle density, etc. The purpose of this research is to study the phenomenon of powder flow induced by rough surface moving walls and to simulate the concentration profile of the combination of two powders to predict the degree of mixing. To accomplish the latter, a new term in the constitutive equation will be used, the interparticle force between the particles of the different components, along with either the theory of mixture or theory of interacting continua and the governing equations. These simulation results will be compared to those obtained from simulation with the Discrete Element Method and experimental data obtained when mixing two different powders in the rough surface moving walls apparatus developed in the laboratory. Preliminary results show that the particle size strongly affects the flow of the bulk causing different degrees of mixing at the end of each experiment. The phenomena of dilatation and consolidation were remarkable