For example, the feedrate and accuracy of a weighbatching system’s conveyor or feeder doesn’t exclusively determine the system’s overall capacity and accuracy. Other factors that may affect productivity and success include material delivery method, infeed rate, surge vessel capacity, weighing equipment location in relation to mixers, hopper and chute design based on the material’s physical prop...

The flow and handling of granular materials is of major importance to many industries. Yet despite efforts over several decades, the modeling of such flows has achieved only modest success. Dense gravity-driven flows in hoppers have been often modeled as elastic-plastic continua, for example. In this picture, the granular material flows as a plastic with a frictional yield condition, and deform...

A facile and mild solution method has been discovered for the synthesis of complex PbTe hopper crystals in large quantities, which are highly similar to the cubic halite skeletal crystals formed from extreme supersaturation in salt lakes existing in nature. This route may provide a new approach to growing other complex semiconductor structures of high hierarchy.

We measure the flow of granular materials inside a quasi-two-dimensional silo as it drains and compare the data with some existing models. The particles inside the silo are imaged and tracked with unprecedented resolution in both space and time to obtain their velocity and diffusion properties. The data obtained by varying the orifice width and the hopper angle allow us to thoroughly test model...

We analyze the polynomials H n(x) considered by Gould and Hopper, which generalize the classical Hermite polynomials. We present the main properties of H n(x) and derive asymptotic approximations for large values of n from their differential-difference equation, using a discrete ray method. We give numerical examples showing the accuracy of our formulas.