Numerical evaluation of the granular mixing behavior in a flighted rotary drum through the Discrete Element Method

A systematic investigation concerning the particle mixing behavior in a flighted rotary drum through experiments and numerical simulations using DEM was performed in this study. The DEM input parameters were calibrated herein based on experimental observations. The effects of the number of flights, the height of the flights, and the drum filling degree on the mixing performance were analyzed by using a suitable design of experiments. The mixing phenomena was analyzed for both size-driven and density-driven effects. The proposed study contributed to improve understanding the particle mixture dynamics in a flighted rotary drum. The results shown that kinetic constant of the mixture (k) strongly increases with increasing the number of flights until reaching four flights and the highest values were obtained with 6 and 8 flights. The highest values of the Lacey mixing indexes for both binary mixtures analyzed were obtained using six flights and H/R equal to 0.75. The simulation results were found to be in good agreement with the experimental data.