Experiments and discrete element simulation of the dosing of cohesive powders in a simplified geometry (Reprinted from Powder Technol, vol 287, pg 108-120,)

We perform experiments and discrete element simulations on the dosing of cohesive granular materials in a simplified geometry. The setup is a canister box where the powder is dosed out through the action of a constant-pitch coil feeder connected to a motor. A dosing step consists of a rotation followed by a period of rest before the next step. From the experiments, we report on the operational performance of the dosing process through a variation of dosage time, coil pitch and initial powder filling mass. We find that the mass per dose shows an increasing linear dependence on the dosage time and rotation speed. In contrast, the mass output from the canister is inversely proportional (as expected) to an increase in the number of coils.