Características de fluxos e vazão de descarga em silos verticais.

Abstract

Today with the advancement in the agricultural industry, the use of silos is essential in order to maintain the quality of products such as grains, seeds and other agricultural inputs. Silo are basically two flow patterns, the mass flow and funnel flow, where the mass flow is characterized by the movement of ali particles in the product, while the funnel flow, there are three one, where the first layer is moving the second one is waiting for it to come in motion and the third remains flat during the process. The objective of this research were to document and assess through high resolution images of the flow pattern and its variants in silos through industrial scale model of semicircular cross section and measure its flow discharge for four bulk solids. For the analysis of the flow was used British Material Handling Board recommendations while the flow experimental results were obtained compared to the theoretical equations of Beverloo et al. and Rotter. It was observed that when using a flat bottom, there was the mass flow determined by H/D ratio passing then to flow funnel. For soybean flow varied depending on the geometry of the silo (flat bottom or hopper) between mass and dropping funnel, while for ground corn, the type of flow was observed regardless of the funnel using a flat or hopper. For the values of flow discharge, none of the theories tested was able to reproduce accurately the experimental results indicating a need to adapt them to each particular situation.