NUMERICAL STUDY OF A HORIZONTAL MASS-MOVEMENT CONVEYOR

摘要

A conveying medium of mass-movement conveyors is an endless chain on which are mounted flights at suitable intervals and the chain circulates in a trough. The flight pulls a cross section of particles along with it that is larger than the area of flight itself. We investigate the flow mechanism of this conveyor in a horizontal configuration by a discrete element method (DEM), applying a periodic boundary and omitting the existence of fluid medium. The duct diameter is varied from 20mm to 40mm, the axial calculation length is 21mm and the chain velocity is varied from 0.5m/s to 2.0m/s. A straight rod of 1mm diameter models the chain and spheres of 5mm diameter models the flights, the interval being 7mm. The diameter of conveyed particles is 1.4mm. There are three different particle flow regions. The mass flow rate of particles depends on the chain velocity and pipe size.