2004 Volume 66 Issue 4 Pages 57-64
To design the bulk storage structures such as silo, hopper, etc., it is very important for us to grasp not only flow phenomena of powder and granular materials but also physical quantities acting on every part of the structure. In this article the finite element analysis program in which the subloading surface model falling within the framework of the unconventional plasticity was introduced, was applied for the analysis of the flow phenomena of wheat flour stored in the flat-bottomed silo. These results were compared with the flow phenomena and wall pressure distributions obtained by the discrete element simulation after Masson and Martinez (2000). The flow phenomena by two different methods almost agreed qualitatively. However the wall pressure distribution by FEM differs from one by DEM and its difference becomes large with the wall friction.
