(131d) The Effect of Particle Shape in Screw Feeders.

Granular Material 9GM) is the second most manipulated substance in the world and present in a number of industries either as input or final products. At the macro-scale GM exhibits complex behavior which most often does not fit into empirical relations that exists for fluids. This complex macro-scale behavior is a result of the interactions of individual particles at the grain scale, hence a numerical method like DEM is the most feasible to aid in the controlled manipulation of GM. While the DEM has been used since the early 90's to simulate industrial devices such as ball mills and slio's its usage has been limited owing to simplistic particle shape assumptions and low number of particles as a result of its computational expense. While in some cases the assumption of spherical particles and a reduced scale is sufficient, in the case of screw feeders which are used in a number of industries to deliver precise dosages this oversimplification maybe lead to erroneous results. In this paper we study the effect that particle shape has on the spatial distribution of particulate matter in screw feeders as well the degradation of the material which effects product quality and production rates using the polyhedra particle based open-source GPU code Blaze-DEM. We will also discuss our utilization of GPU computing technology in the commercial code XPS that enables us to tackle large scale problems concerning the screw feeding of pharmaceutical powders.