Granular Flow

Traffic in India is notorious for being highly unruly and disorganized. Is this solely due to a lack of discipline on the part of drivers, or does the high density and heterogeneous nature of Indian traffic (mix of scooters, cars, buses and trucks) contribute to the emergence of collective chaotic dynamics? With the number of vehicles on our roads increasing each year, it is important to understand the fundamentals of Indian traffic flow in order to engineer solutions to problems like traffic congestion that plague our major cities.

Turbulent, dense fluid-particle flows are commonly encountered in engineering processes such as in air jet mills as well as terrestrial and extra-terrestrial phenomena, e.g., bedload sediment transport, movement of sand dunes, impingement of jets on planetary surfaces. High speed fluid flows on dense beds are complex in nature because of the coupling between the fluid and solid phases.

Particle size reduction is a highly energy intensive operation and even small improvements in efficiency can result in significant energy savings. The focus of the present work is analysis and optimization of an air jet mill, which is a versatile equipment used in many industries for fine grinding of powders to sizes less than around 10 microns. The objective of the project is be to develop a detailed simulation model using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and the discrete element method (DEM).