Numerical simulation of aerated powder consolidation

When a fine powder is dumped into a silo, the gas trapped by the particles will slowly escape by diffusing through the material. The corresponding uneven gas pressure distribution creates a body force that is taken into account through Darcy's law. By using spatial averaging, the formulation, even though essentially one-dimensional in space, includes effects due the geometry of the container. An efficient and robust numerical scheme based on a differential algebraic equation formulation is proposed and implemented, Various computational results are presented and discussed to establish the validity of the approach. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.