Analyses of slow high-concentration flows of granular materials

A theory intended for slow, dense flows of cohesionless granular materials is developed for the case of planar deformations. By considering granular flows on very fine scales, one can conveniently split the individual particle velocities into fluctuating and mean transport components, and employ the notion of granular temperature that plays a central role in rapid granular flows. On somewhat larger scales, one can think of analogous fluctuations in strain rates. Both kinds of fluctuations are utilized in the present paper. Following the standard continuum approach, the conservation equations for mass, momentum and particle translational fluctuation energy are presented. The latter two equations involve constitutive coefficients, whose determination is one of the main concerns of the present paper. We begin with an associated flow rule for the case of a compressible, frictional, plastic continuum. The functional dependence of the flow rule is chosen so that the limiting behaviours of the resulting constitutive relations are consistent with the results of the kinetic theories developed for rapid flow regimes. Following Hibler (1977) and assuming that there are fluctuations in the strain rates that have, for example, a Gaussian distribution function, it is possible to obtain a relationship between the mean stress and the mean strain rate. It turns out, perhaps surprisingly, that this relationship has a viscous-like character. For low shear rates, the constitutive behaviour is similar to that of a liquid in the sense that the effective viscosity decreases with increasing granular temperature, whereas for rapid granular flows, the viscosity increases with increasing granular temperature as in a gas. The rate of energy dissipation can be determined in a manner similar to that used to derive the viscosity coefficients. After assuming that the magnitude of the strain-rate fluctuations can be related to the granular temperature, we obtain a closed system of equations that can be used to solve boundary value problems. The theory is used to consider the case of a simple shear flow. The resulting expressions for the stress components are similar to models previously proposed on a more ad hoc basis in which quasi-static stress contributions were directly patched to rate-dependent stresses. The problem of slow granular flow in rough-walled vertical chutes is then considered and the velocity, concentration and granular temperature profiles are determined. Thin boundary layers next to the vertical sidewalls arise with the concentration boundary layer being thicker than the velocity boundary layer. This kind of behaviour is observed in both laboratory experiments and in granular dynamics simulations of vertical chute flows.