Granular flow and fluidized beds

Granular materials — powders, seeds, sand, pharmaceutical pellets — behave unlike ordinary solids or fluids: they can flow like a liquid under stress, yet jam and support loads like a solid, and predicting when and how they switch between these states remains genuinely difficult. Researchers use discrete element method (DEM) simulations and continuum rheological models to track how individual particles collide, pack, and move collectively, often in the presence of a gas that can suspend and fluidize the bed. These tools are essential for designing industrial processes ranging from pharmaceutical tablet manufacturing to chemical reactors, where poorly understood flow behavior leads to clogging, segregation, or inconsistent product quality. Active challenges include bridging the gap between particle-scale simulations and large-scale process models, and developing constitutive laws that hold across the dense, dilute, and intermediate flow regimes that coexist in real systems.

Works

69,273

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1,114,406

Keywords

Granular FlowsDiscrete Particle SimulationFluidized BedsDEM ModelingParticle DynamicsRheology