Professional Articles

Particle Science

Logistics of Bulk Materials II - Specification of Basic Tasks

The optimization of bulk materials handling technology using methods of logistics can create significant competitional advantages. Therefore, operators and producers of bulk material handling and processing equipment are very concerned about the optimization of their products.
Quite often, bulk material research work is focused on the problems connected with flow failures in bulk material storage facilities, e.g. silos, bins or bunkers, which cause an interruption of the material flow [8,9]. The formation of arches in silos are the most common causes of such failures. These phenomena are of a complex character and depend on various physical characteristics of the flow process. The most relevant factors are the properties of the bulk material, the outlet dimensions, the shape of the silo and the surface characteristics of the inner silo walls.
This paper presents a method to calculate the position of a dynamic or static arche above an outlet for an idealized bulk materials or, respectively, wet and viscous bulk materials. The equations given provided paper were derived with respect to mechanical and physical properties of these two bulk material categories. For other types of real bulk materials appropriate corrections with respect to specific mechanical and physical properties must carried out. Those are mostly compressible bulk materials, mixtures of various materials differing in dimension and shape of particles or in their bulk densities.