Learning Forum

[Gerhard van der Bijl]

Good day ,

I am working on designing a new Feed Bin for a chome wash plant. I think I have everything in order on the Ansys workbench and mechanical, but I doubt how I loaded my structure and if the results I obtained are valid. I selected all 4 faces on the inside and used an applied force on it of 360 kN. If someone can give advice on how to simulate this scenario better , I would appreciate it very much . I hope the Screenshots also thoroughly explains :

-Fixed supports beneath Bin stands x 5

-Mesh Quality is good

-For the force I selected all 4 sloped faces simultaniously and added 360 kN in the negative Y direction

 

 

[Claudio Pedrazzi]

Hi,

for those outside the branch of industry, would you mind explaining briefly what the hopper contains? is the material granular? does it behave like a fluid? does friction with the walls play a role? 

[Gerhard van der Bijl]

Hi There,

The Bin will contain Chrome ore , the size of dust up to 20 mm chips. Wall friction does play a role, thus the rule of thumb is to get as close to 60 degrees as possible for the material to overcome the wall friction.The fine material loves to stick together while the chips have little to no flow problems. It does not behave like a fluid. In our current Bin design, two of the wall angles are 40 degrees. With multiple other problems of the current bin , the material ratholes. I have researched and designed this Bin shape according to all critical spesifications, but I am unsure if I sumulated to load correctly.

[Claudio Pedrazzi]

 

Thank you for the clarification. 
The question about fluid-like behaviour was due to the possible consideration of using a pressure, i.e. a load always directed orthogonally to the container walls.
If the vertical load you used corresponds to the weight of the material, I think it may be a good first approximation, although perhaps out of professional bias I still think the uniform distribution you are implicitly using may not correspond to reality: after all, intuitively, I think at the bottom there may be higher loads per unit area due to the ‘column’ of ore above.  
Finally, if the material moves, there is a frictional force parallel to the wall, to be considered, which (I think) is not taken into account in your model.  
Please bear in mind that these suggestions come from someone who is completely outside this industry.

 

[Gerhard van der Bijl]

This Clarifies a lot, thank you very much. I will try a few more simulations. I was not happy with the applied vertical load since I knew I was not getting correct data in the different regions of the bin, especially at the bottom of the hopper, but I have limited Ansys knowledge on how to apply a load like this. I will look into these methods.

[Claudio Pedrazzi]

 

I’m happy I could contribute.  Definitely have a look at the “Pressure” and “Hydrostatic Pressure” type of load.  Whatever combination of load types you decide to use, make sure that the sum of all of them, in the vertical direction, equals at least the weight of the ore contained in the hopper (360 kN?).  You can do this by checking the sum of all vertical reactions at the constrained points.