(204e) Model Parameters Calibration for DEM By Macroscopic Characterization of Granular Material

DEM simulations are powerful tools to model the powder behaviours. Especially, they allow to simulate powder at large scale and to reproduce granular materials behaviour in an industrial process. Reproducing a complete industrial process in laboratory can be complex and expansive. When this process is modeled by an experimental setup, that reproduces the industrial device at a lower scale, correlating the results with what is observed at larger scale can be complex or irrelevant. The advantage of the simulations is that they can model these complex processes at a similar scale. However, it can be hard to know the adequate microscopic parameters to fix in the simulation (coefficients of friction, coefficients of restitution, cohesive interactions, ...) to reproduce what is observed experimentally.

Some measurements can be performed at the scale of the grains, like AFM techniques, to obtain these parameters, but these methods can be time consuming and expansive. We propose a top-bottom method based on the characterization workflow of a real powder in a rotating drum. This geometry is adequate to characterize the cohesiveness and the flowability of a powder and can be easily simulated. Therefore, experimental results can be directly compared with the simulations to make a validation of the selected parameters. We present case studies obtained with the GranuDrum, an instrument that reproduce the rotating drum geometry. Moreover, we discuss the perspectives that this kind of methodology can bring for a better understanding of powder flowability and process improvement.