Research On Distribution Of Lateral Bulk-Solid Pressures On Silos' Walls

A silo is a common storage structure for a wide variety of bulk materials such as cement, coal, gravel, food grains, and etc. Furthermore, most types of bulk materials handling such as mixing, proportioning, and distributing are operated inside a silo. As a result there is a growing demand for large-capacity storage and the silo dimensions have increased markedly with greater height, larger diameter, or both. The weight of the stored bulk materials may also increase to a great extent.The large diameter squat silo is a new storehouse type introduced and built in recent years. There is no appropriate formula for calculation of wall pressure, and the overpressure problem caused by top pile is not well solved. Therefore, it is the urgent problem to be solved in the practical engineering.It is well known that the dynamic lateral pressure, as primary load, is more than the static lateral pressure on the wall of deep bin. Whereas many national standards including Chinese introduce a modified coefficient into Janssen formula to calculate the dynamic pressure, so the modified coefficient given by the technical literatures and codes of different countries are not quite the same. Rules of the movement of material are pretty complicated and up to the present, not yet fully understood and have not been researched quantitatively.Based on test of real silo, theoretical analysis and numerical simulation, the static wall pressure of shallow bin and the dynamic lateral pressure of deep bin are studied, which provides foundation for the design of silo, the revision of code and the theoretical study.