Abstract
The inside pressure of a silo, especially the dynamic pressure during discharge is a very important factor in its structural design. However, numerical simulations of this problem have seldom been preformed because of their complexity. In previous papers, it was shown that the distinct element method (DEM) is suitable to apply to this problem. In this report, the characteristic distributions of the pressures on silo walls in the steady state and during discharge are studied using a DEM simulation, and the influence of friction coefficients is mainly examined. A result of this study is that the pressure distributions in the steady state from the DEM simulation are similar to the theoretical or experimental ones. A pressure increase during discharge is observed. However, the model used in this study is very rough and small compared to practical ones, but it can be used to simulate the complicated behaviors of granular materials during discharge in real silos.
