In earlier works by the present authors, two systems for sustainable energy were proposed: (i) a system for urban snow removal in winter and storage for air conditioning in summer, applied to Nagaoka City, which suffers heavy snow fall every winter, and (ii) a district cooling system utilizing latent heat of ice to reduce the size of storage reservoir and transportation pipeline system. In thes...

Soft-sphere discrete element method (DEM) and Navier-Stokes equations were coupled with equations of energy for gas and solids to investigate the process of agglomeration in fluidized bed of polyethylene particles at high temperature. The Newton’s second law of motion was adapted for translational and rotational motion of particles and agglomerates. The cohesive force for polyethylene particles...

Cohesive powders have widely different bulk behavior due to their peculiar interactions. We use discrete element simulations to investigate the effect of contact cohesion on the steady state flow of dense powders in a slowly sheared split-bottom Couette cell, which imposes a wide stable shear band. The intensity of cohesive forces can be quantified by the granular Bond number (Bo), namely the r...

Recent research on the electrochemical lithiation of amorphous silicon nanoparticles shows that amorphous silicon is more fracture resistant than crystalline silicon during lithiation. Nanoparticles of amorphous silicon can be lithiated and delithiated without any fracture at all. To fully exploit the potential of using amorphous silicon as electrodes for lithium ion batteries it is important t...

A shear-lag model with a cohesive fibre–matrix interface has been developed for the analysis of stress transfer between the fibre and the matrix in fibre-reinforced composites in this paper. A bilinear cohesive damage evolution law is used to describe the fibre–matrix interface behaviour. The governing equations for the interfacial shear stress and the axial stress in the fibre are derived. Acc...

Discrete Element Methods (DEM) are a useful tool to model the fracture of cohesive granular materials. For this kind of application, simple particle shapes (discs in 2D, spheres in 3D) are usually employed. However, dealing with more general particle shapes allows to account for the natural heterogeneity of grains inside real materials. We present a discrete model allowing to mimic cohesion bet...

We use the cohesive zone failure model to simulate debonding and failure in high strain-rate plane strain deformations of a heat conducting particulate composite comprised of initially circular metallic particulates immersed in a metallic matrix, with the goal of delineating the effect of these failures on the initiation and propagation of adiabatic shear bands (ASBs). Failure is assumed to ens...

One of the primary objectives in the design of composite structures is the prevention of premature bond failure. Therefore, the characterization of cohesive behavior is an important field of study in structural engineering. Using fracture mechanics principles, the cohesive behavior of an epoxy bonded coarse silica sand aggregate bond interface is studied in this paper, with a focus on finding a...

In this paper, a new cohesive interface model is applied to characterize carbon nanotube (CNT) composites using the boundary element method (BEM). In the previous BEM models of CNT composites, a rigid-inclusion model was employed to represent the CNTs in a polymer matrix due to their extremely high stiffness as compared with the polymer. Perfect bonding interface conditions between the CNT fibe...

13 In the shear deformation of powder beds beyond the quasi-static regime the shear stress is dependent 14 on the strain rate. Extensive work has been reported on the rapid chute flow of large granules but the 15 intermediate regime has not been widely addressed particularly in the case of cohesive powders. 16 However in industrial powder processes the powder flow is often in the intermediate r...