Heat Transfer in Flowing Granular Materials

Heat transfer plays a major role in storage, handling, and processing of bulk solids such as grains, powders, pharmaceutical products, fossil fuels, etc. An important problem with wide applications in chemical industry is the flow of particulate matter on an inclined surface. In this work, we consider the free surface flow of granular materials down an inclined plane. The surface of the inclined is heated and the effects of radiation heat transfer at the free surface are studied. It is assumed that the material behaves like a continuum, similar to a compressible non-Newtonian fluid where the effects of density gradients are incorporated in the stress tensor. For a fully developed flow the equations simplify to a system of three non-linear ordinary differential equations. The equations are made dimensionless and a parametric study is performed where the effects of various dimensionless numbers representing the effects of heat conduction, viscous dissipation, etc, are presented.