TRANSITION PHENOMENON INVESTIGATION BETWEEN DIFFERENT FLOW REGIMES IN A ROTARY DRUM

摘要

Rotary drums can show different granular flow regimes each one with its own specific flow behavior, which increase the complexity in their study. The way particles move inside the rotary drum is directly related to the mass and energy transfer rates, and consequently to the process performance. Thus, an experimental investigation regarding the transition between different flow regimes inside a rotary drum was carried out in the present work. To the best of our knowledge, the hysteresis phenomenon was observed for the first time in the transition between cataracting-centrifuging regimes, which was shown to be dependent on the physical properties of the particles such as sphericity, density and particle-wall friction coefficient. A new expression for the centrifuging critical rotation speed was proposed in this work.