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Article history: Rapeseed is one of the major sources of vegetable oil. Improving processing and storage conditions is
Accepted 22 March 2014 very important in order to get high quality product. Rapeseed stored in silos is at constant risk of
Available online 14 April 2014 deterioration of quality. The self-heating phenomenon is the main reason for deterioration during
storage. Therefore, the aim of the present work was to describe the temperature distribution during this
Keywords: phenomenon and determine whether the self-heating area in a silo could be predicted. The discrete
Temperature distribution
element method (DEM) was used to predict temperature distributions in rapeseed in a cylindrical storage
Self-heating
bin and to describe the self-heating process of rapeseed. Model validation was carried out by comparing
Granular assembly
Discrete element method
the results of the model with experimentally measured grain temperatures at different points in a model
Silo silo. The predicted and measured temperatures were found to be in good agreement. DEM may be useful
for predicting temperature distributions in a silo and can describe the self-heating phenomenon.
2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jspr.2014.03.009
0022-474X/ 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
R. Rusinek, R. Kobyka / Journal of Stored Products Research 59 (2014) 254e259 255
In practice, the safe storage of seeds requires their ventilation 2.2. Model silo
(Rusinek et al., 2012). Safety and measurement equipment is used
to control the conditions of storage, and the condition monitoring is A measurement station was developed for the study presented
usually based upon measurements of the temperature in the here, composed of a model cylindrical silo with a capacity of 3.85 m3
intergranular space (Jia et al., 2001). For the storage of dry matter, (w2500 kg), which was lled with winter rapeseed of the variety
ISO 4112:1990 (ISO, 1990) recommends that temperature sensors Suzy. A cylindrical container with a height H and diameter D of 1.7 m
should be arranged geometrically in a silo in the shape of a grid. The (so that H/D 1) was constructed from steel sheeting. The surface of
present work is centered on the description of temperature in- the seedbed was covered with plywood. The container was lled
creases that indicate self-heating. centrally, directly from a screw conveyor. The sensors were placed
Testing destructive phenomena such as self-heating in labora- every 0.15 m in one plane in both vertical and horizontal directions.
tory experiments is demanding of time and resources. However, the In the rst test (Fig. 1a), the sensor network was adjusted so as to
development of computer technology and numerical algorithms in place the intersection of the horizontal and vertical axes at the
recent decades provides us with an opportunity to devise a more center of the model container, where the most rapid progression of
convenient alternative. Numerical modeling of heat transfer inside the heating phenomenon might be expected to occur. In this
a mass of material is usually based on assumptions of continuum experiment, the silo was lled with three layers of seeds, each 0.5 m
behavior and homogeneity, using, for example, the nite element high: the rst layer, at the bottom, had a moisture content of 7%
method or computational uid dynamics (a basic description of (w.b.), the second layer had a moisture content of 12.7%, and the last
such models can be found, for example, in Wang and Sun, 2003). layer, at the top, had a moisture content of 7% again. The moisture
Recently, there have been a number of numerical simulations of content of the seeds was determined by oven drying at 103 1 C
heat transfer, pressure distributions, and airows in grain silos (Xu for 72 h (ASAE, 2006).
and Burfoot, 1999; Jia et al., 2000a,b; Moran et al., 2006; Juan et al., The second test (Fig. 1b) was performed with an internal heat
2006; Chourasia and Goswami, 2007). However, although such source. An electric heater (0.17 kW, 230 V, consisting of a heating
approaches may give accurate time-averaged results, they do not mat 0.8 m long and 0.5 m wide, which generated a maximum
take account of interparticle interactions in the granular bed, nor of temperature of 40 C) was installed at the bottom of the container.
the behavior of distinct particles (Chaudhuri et al., 2006). The temperature of the heater was increased in accordance with
In recent years, one of the more popular approaches for dealing the typical progression of self-heating: for the rst six days, the
with granular media has been the discrete (or distinct) element increase was about 1 C per day, and for subsequent days, 2 C per
method (DEM). This was originally proposed by Cundall and Strack day. A digital programmer and temperature sensors in the bulk
(1979), but has been extensively developed and used over the last material were used to control the increase of the temperature in the
20 years. The DEM was originally developed to simulate the me- silo. Three replications of the experiment were performed. Tem-
chanical response of a granular bed. However, it can easily be perature in the laboratory was controlled at 21 C.
extended to study other physical properties such as heat transfer (Li
and Mason, 2000; Chaudhuri et al., 2006; Kwapinska et al., 2008;
Nguyen et al., 2009). 2.3. Numerical DEM simulation
In the work reported here, the DEM software package LIGGGHTS,
developed by Kloss et al. (2012) was used. The aim was to evaluate The DEM algorithm is based on four main steps, namely:
the potential application of DEM to predicting phenomena such as
self-heating. The objectives of this study were as follows. detection of particleeparticle and particleewall contacts;
application of forces (contact, gravity, etc.) to each particle;
to determine the progress of the self-heating phenomenon with constructing and solving a set of differential equations based on
time and to nd out whether, and if so how fast, a grid of Newtons second law of motion for every particle;
temperature sensors situated in the bed can detect an area of updating the particle parameters (e.g., positions and velocities)
self-heating; after a time step and repeating the whole cycle.
to adapt the DEM model to predict the temperature distribution
in a rapeseed storage bin and to describe the self-heating phe- In the most basic form of the three-dimensional DEM, the sys-
nomenon; and tem of equations in the third step consists of three equations for the
to validate the simulation model based on experimental data. spatial coordinates and three for the rotational coordinates. How-
ever, this system can easily be extended with additional equations,
describing other particle properties transferred during contact, for
2. Methods example charge and temperature.
The mathematical model used in the present work for calcu-
2.1. Measuring system lating the contact forces between colliding particles was based on
Hertzs theory, extended with a tangential force based on the work
The system was composed of 20 sensors. Each sensor measured of Mindlin and Deresiewicz (see, e.g., Di Renzo and Di Maio, 2004).
the temperature and relative humidity (r.h.) of the air in the In the case of a static bed discussed here the normal component of
intergranular space. The temperature and r.h. values were trans- the contact force is calculated as follows:
mitted over single wires to a control module. All data e sensor
4 * p* 3=2
numbers, temperature and r.h. values, measurement numbers, and N E R dij ; (1)
additional information e were archived in the memory of the
3
control module. After the test, control module was connected to the where the reduced parameters representing the Youngs modulus
PC to copy the data. Each of the humidity and temperature sensors E*, and particle radius R* are calculated as follows:
was built into a square plastic box with a size of 10 10 15 mm.
The casing had 1 mm diameter holes in it, sufcient to ensure a free
1 1 v2i 1 v2j
ow of air. This paper presents the results of the temperature ; (2)
measurements only. E* Ei Ej
256 R. Rusinek, R. Kobyka / Journal of Stored Products Research 59 (2014) 254e259
Fig. 1. Model silo: (a) test 1, self-heating; (b) test 2, with internal source (0, 1, 2,.,19, temperature sensors; distance between sensors 15 cm).
4ki kj q
hc;ij Acontact;ij ; (5)
ki kj
dTi X
old
mi ci Qij Qsource;i (7)
dt contact;ij
dQ
rcp vDT (8)
dt
where, dQ/dt is heat ux, r and cp e bulk density and thermal ca-
pacity of the material, DT e temperature change and v e velocity.
Based on Buckingham P-Theorem, the terms
dQ
dt
P (9)
rcp vDT
should remain constant for all systems, and therefore in our case
dQ dQ
dte dts
(10)
re cpe ve DTe rs cps vs DTs
Fig. 6. DEM predicted temperature distribution: (a) axial cross-section parallel to x-axis; (b) axial cross-section parallel to y-axis; (c) axial cross-section parallel to y-axis, shifted
toward the heat-source area by approximately 0.11D; (d) horizontal cross-section at a height of about 0.25D.
R. Rusinek, R. Kobyka / Journal of Stored Products Research 59 (2014) 254e259 259
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