Spontaneous jamming and unjamming in a hopper with multiple exit orifices

Abstract

We show that the flow of granular material inside a 2-dimensional flat bottomed hopper is altered significantly by having more than one exit orifice. For the hoppers with small orifice widths, inter-mittent flow through one orifice enables the resumption of flow through the adjacent jammed orifice, thus displaying a sequence of jamming and unjamming events. Using discrete element simulations, we show that the total amount of granular material (i.e. avalanche size) emanating from all the orifices combined can be enhanced by about an order of magnitude difference by simply adjusting the inter-orifice distance. The unjamming is driven primarily by fluctuations alone when the inter-orifice distance is large, but when the orifices are brought close enough, the fluctuations along with the mean flow cause the flow unjamming.

5 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Invited review: Clogging of granular materials in bottlenecks
• Room evacuation through two contiguous exits
• Dynamics of a grain-scale intruder in a two-dimensional granular medium with and without basal friction
• Flow of granular matter in a silo with multiple exit orifices: Jamming to mixing
• Cooperative effects induced by intruders evolving through a granular medium
• The effect of obstacles near a silo outlet on the discharge of soft spheres
• Friction-mediated flow and jamming in a two-dimensional silo with two exit orifices
• Flow and clogging behavior of a mixture of particles in a silo
• Reorganization of a granular medium around a localized transformation
• Flow rate from a vertical silo with a tilted orifice