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Constitutive relations for compressible granular flow in the inertial regime

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 July 2019

D. G. Schaeffer
Affiliation:
Mathematics Department, Duke University, Box 90320, Durham, NC 27708-0320, USA
T. Barker
Affiliation:
School of Mathematics and Manchester Centre for Nonlinear Dynamics, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK
D. Tsuji
Affiliation:
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Nagoya University, Furocho, Chikusa, Nagoya 464-8601, Japan
P. Gremaud
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8205, USA
M. Shearer
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8205, USA
J. M. N. T. Gray*
Affiliation:
School of Mathematics and Manchester Centre for Nonlinear Dynamics, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK
*
†Email address for correspondence: nico.gray@manchester.ac.uk

Abstract

Granular flows occur in a wide range of situations of practical interest to industry, in our natural environment and in our everyday lives. This paper focuses on granular flow in the so-called inertial regime, when the rheology is independent of the very large particle stiffness. Such flows have been modelled with the $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}(I),\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F7}(I)$-rheology, which postulates that the bulk friction coefficient $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}$ (i.e. the ratio of the shear stress to the pressure) and the solids volume fraction $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$ are functions of the inertial number $I$ only. Although the $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}(I),\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F7}(I)$-rheology has been validated in steady state against both experiments and discrete particle simulations in several different geometries, it has recently been shown that this theory is mathematically ill-posed in time-dependent problems. As a direct result, computations using this rheology may blow up exponentially, with a growth rate that tends to infinity as the discretization length tends to zero, as explicitly demonstrated in this paper for the first time. Such catastrophic instability due to ill-posedness is a common issue when developing new mathematical models and implies that either some important physics is missing or the model has not been properly formulated. In this paper an alternative to the $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}(I),\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F7}(I)$-rheology that does not suffer from such defects is proposed. In the framework of compressible $I$-dependent rheology (CIDR), new constitutive laws for the inertial regime are introduced; these match the well-established $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}(I)$ and $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F7}(I)$ relations in the steady-state limit and at the same time are well-posed for all deformations and all packing densities. Time-dependent numerical solutions of the resultant equations are performed to demonstrate that the new inertial CIDR model leads to numerical convergence towards physically realistic solutions that are supported by discrete element method simulations.

Information

Type
JFM Papers
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019
Figure 0

Figure 1. Steady-state relations for (a) the bulk friction coefficient $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}$ and (b) the solids volume fraction $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$ as functions of the inertial number $I$. Solid blue lines are the functional forms (2.10) and (2.11) evaluated with the parameters in table 1. Symbols are the results of multiple DEM simulations (see appendix C for details) in which the normal spring constant $k^{(n)}$, the cell height $H$ and number of particles $N$ have been varied.

Figure 1

Table 1. The parameters in the constitutive laws (2.10) and (2.11) which are the best-fit parameters for the DEM data plotted in figure 1.

Figure 2

Figure 2. Initial conditions used to illustrate the computational difficulties encountered with the $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}(I),\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F7}(I)$-rheology. Panels (a–c) show the non-dimensional velocity components $\hat{u} (\hat{z},0)$, ${\hat{w}}(\hat{z},0)$ and the packing fraction $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}(\hat{z},0)$ as a function of the non-dimensional vertical coordinate $\hat{z}$, respectively, for the initial condition (3.16) with $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}_{0}=0.78$, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D716}=0.05$ and ${\hat{H}}=30$. Panel (d) shows a plot of the function $\unicode[STIX]{x1D712}(\hat{z})$, defined in (A 18), which determines where the flow is well-posed ($\unicode[STIX]{x1D712}<0$) or ill-posed ($\unicode[STIX]{x1D712}>0$).

Figure 3

Figure 3. Snapshots of the non-dimensional vertical velocity for the $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}(I),\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F7}(I)$-rheology computed with the method of lines in (a) a high-resolution finite difference discretization ($N_{z}=201$), (b) a high-resolution Chebychev spectral discretization ($N_{z}=201$) and (c) a low-resolution finite difference discretization ($N_{z}=47$). In each panel the initial condition of the vertical velocity (3.16) is shown with a dashed black line. Movies 1–3 show the full time evolution of all fields ($\hat{u}$, ${\hat{w}}$ and $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$) and are available in the online supplementary material at https://doi.org/10.1017/jfm.2019.476.

Figure 4

Figure 4. (a) A comparison of the temporal evolution of the maximum vertical velocity $|{\hat{w}}|$ for the numerical computations presented in figure 3. The computations use the method of lines with a finite difference (dashed lines) and a Chebyshev (solids lines) discretization at both high (red lines) and low (blue lines) spatial resolution. The time $\hat{t}_{\ast }=0.01052$ at which the Chebyshev scheme becomes non-convergent is indicated. (b) The final time $\hat{t}_{\ast }$ before convergence failure is plotted for the Chebyshev spectral discretization as a function of the number of grid points $N_{z}$. The same plot (not shown) for failure of the finite difference computation is qualitatively similar, but differs in detail.

Figure 5

Figure 5. Black lines plot the ratio $Y/p$ as a function of $I$ for varying values of the solids volume fraction $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$ in iCIDR. The blue line shows $Y/p=\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}(I)$ and the black dots show the steady isochoric state of each of the $Y/p$ lines, i.e. $I=\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F9}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D719})$ and $Y/p=\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F9}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}))$. The dashed red line shows the value of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}_{d}$.

Figure 6

Figure 6. (a) Numerical computations for the evolution of the one-dimensional vertical velocity ${\hat{w}}(\hat{z},\hat{t})$ for iCIDR. The initial conditions are given by (3.16) with $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}_{0}=0.78$, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D716}=0.05$ and ${\hat{H}}=30$. The method of lines and first-order finite difference approximations are used to compute the solution, which is shown at a sequence of times with $N_{z}=47$ grid points (open circles) and $N_{z}=201$ grid points (solid lines). This explicitly demonstrates that the numerical solution is grid converged. (b) The evolution of the maximum vertical velocity in time for $N_{z}=47$ grid points (blue circles) and $N_{z}=201$ grid points (red solid line). The numerical solution is very close to the steady-state solution (3.10) by 10 non-dimensional units. Supplementary movies 4 and 5 show the evolution of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}(\hat{z},\hat{t})$, $\hat{u} (\hat{z},\hat{t})$ and ${\hat{w}}(\hat{z},\hat{t})$ for both the finite difference and Chebyshev spectral discretizations.

Figure 7

Figure 7. Time-dependent numerical simulation for iCIDR. The flow starts from the perturbed initial conditions (5.7) with $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}_{0}=0.78$, $\hat{a}=0.16$ and $\hat{b}=0.1$ and converges towards the steady solution (3.10). In panels (a–c) the solid lines correspond to a high spatial resolution ($N_{z}=201$) and open circles to a lower resolution ($N_{z}=47$). Panel (d) is a plot of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D712}$ defined in (A 18) at $t=0$, which implies that, unlike iCIDR, the $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}(I),\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F7}(I)$-rheology would be strongly ill-posed for these initial conditions. (e) The iCIDR constitutive relations ensure that at both low (open circles, $N_{z}=47$) and high (solid red line, $N_{z}=201$) spatial resolution the maximum vertical velocity ${\hat{w}}$ decays to the steady-state value ${\hat{w}}=0$ everywhere. An animation of the simulation (supplementary movie 6) is available in the online supplementary material.

Figure 8

Figure 8. A comparison between the iCIDR continuum calculation, detailed in figure 7, and the results of two-dimensional DEM simulations initialized with the same flow fields. Circles are the mean values and error bars represent the standard deviation of 10 repeat DEM simulations. Supplementary movies 7 and 8 show the evolution of the coarse-grained velocity components $\hat{u}$ and ${\hat{w}}$ alongside renderings of the particles during the simulation. Note that $\hat{u}$ obtained by DEM simulations is given by the relative velocity between the bottom ($\hat{z}=0$) and top ($\hat{z}={\hat{H}}$) layers under the Lees–Edwards boundary conditions in order to simplify the comparison with the iCIDR continuum calculation.

Schaeffer et al. supplementary movie 1

One dimensional transient solution of the μ(I),Φ(I)-rheology computed with the method of lines and a finite difference discretization. Here a high spatial resolution of Nz=201 grid points is used and the full time evolution of the fields u, w and φ are plotted. Due to ill-posedness of the governing equations, there is a catastrophic blow-up and loss of convergence at t=0.008801. Link text : Figure 3(a)

Download Schaeffer et al. supplementary movie 1(Video)
Video 34.1 MB

Schaeffer et al. supplementary movie 2

One dimensional transient solution of the μ(I),Φ(I)-rheology computed with the method of lines and a Chebyshev spectral discretization. Here a high spatial resolution of Nz=201 grid points is used and the full time evolution of the fields u, w and φ are plotted. Due to ill-posedness of the governing equations, there is a catastrophic blow-up and loss of convergence at t=0.009839. Link text : Figure 3(b)

Download Schaeffer et al. supplementary movie 2(Video)
Video 2.3 MB

Schaeffer et al. supplementary movie 3

One dimensional transient solution of the μ(I),Φ(I)-rheology computed with the method of lines and a finite difference discretization. Here a low spatial resolution of Nz=47 grid points is used and the full time evolution of the fields u, w and φ are plotted. Here numerical diffusion is sufficient to artificially regularise the ill-posed problem. Link text : Figure 3(c)

Download Schaeffer et al. supplementary movie 3(Video)
Video 26.8 MB

Schaeffer et al. supplementary movie 4

Numerical computations showing the evolution of the perturbed initial conditions using inertial CIDR. Here a fine numerical mesh with Nz=201 grid points is used. Unlike the equivalent computation using the μ(I),Φ(I)-rheology (as shown in movies 1 and 2) the results are grid-scale and method independent and converge smoothly onto the steady solution. This physically realistic behaviour is due to the well-posedness of the inertial CIDR equations. Link text : Figure 6 Finite Difference

Download Schaeffer et al. supplementary movie 4(Video)
Video 26.9 MB

Schaeffer et al. supplementary movie 5

Transient numerical computations for the evolution of the perturbed initial conditions using inertial CIDR. Here a fine numerical mesh with Nz=201 grid points is used and a Chebyshev spatial discretisation. Unlike the equivalent computation using the μ(I),Φ(I)-rheology (as shown in movies 1 and 2) the results are grid-scale and method independent and converge smoothly onto the steady solution. This physically realistic behaviour is due to the well-posedness of the inertial CIDR equations. Link text : Figure 6 Chebyshev

Download Schaeffer et al. supplementary movie 5(Video)
Video 11.4 MB

Schaeffer et al. supplementary movie 6

Numerical solutions for the temporal evolution of extremely perturbed initial data using the inertial CIDR equations. A high spatial resolution of Nz=201 grid points is used to demonstrate numerical stability and transient evolution towards the steady solution of linear shearing. For these initial conditions, the μ(I),Φ(I)-rheology is strongly ill-posed and comparable calculations are non-convergent even for relatively coarse numerical meshes. Link text : Figure 5

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Video 32 MB

Schaeffer et al. supplementary movie 7

DEM simulations showing the transition from the perturbed initial profile to the steady linear profile. The left panel depicts the behaviour of particles during the simulation, and the right panel shows the coarse-grained velocity component $\hat{u}$. These results are compared to the iCIDR continuum calculations in the main text, which are in good agreement with each other. Note that $\hat{u}$ is given by the relative velocity between the bottom ($\hat{z} = 0$) and top ($\hat{z} = \hat{H}$) layers under the Lees-Edwards boundary conditions. Link Text : Figure 8 horizontal velocity

Download Schaeffer et al. supplementary movie 7(Video)
Video 81.3 MB

Schaeffer et al. supplementary movie 8

DEM simulations showing the transition from the perturbed initial profile to the steady linear profile. The left panel depicts the behaviour of particles during the simulation, and the right panel shows the coarse-grained velocity component $\hat{w}$. These results are compared to the iCIDR continuum calculations in the main text, which are in good agreement with each other. Link Text : Figure 8 vertical velocity

Download Schaeffer et al. supplementary movie 8(Video)
Video 62.6 MB