Title: Flow of Photoelastic Particles in a 2D Silo

Author (Snapshot): Lori McCabe, Mount Holyoke College

Abstract:

We present experimental results on the flow of photoelastic particles in a quasi-2D silo. The raw video data has high temporal and spatial resolution, and thus we can track all particles in the system during flow. However, due to force indeterminacy, having solely kinematic data on a system of particles does not yield information about interparticle forces. The stress-induced birefringence of photoelastic particles allows us to back out this force information from system images. We investigate various combinations of particle/outlet size, and look at the resulting effects on bulk flow, the force network, and measures of mesoscale structural rearrangements such as D2min.