The relationship between attractive interparticle forces and bulk behaviour in dry and uncharged fine powders

The physics of granular materials in ambient gases is governed by interparticle forces, gas - particle interaction, geometry of particle positions and geometry of particle contacts. At low consolidations these are strongly dependent on the external forces, boundary conditions and on the assembling procedure. For dry. ne powders of micron and sub-micron particle size interparticle attractive forces are typically much higher than particle weight, and particles tend to aggregate. Because of this, cohesive powders fracture before breaking, flow and avalanche in coherent blocks much larger than the particle size. Similarly the drag force for micron sized particles is large compared to their weight for velocities as low as 1 mm/s. Due to this extreme sensitivity to interstitial gas flow, powders transit directly from plastic dense flows to fluidization without passing through collisional regimes with negligible gas interaction. These two features, strong attractive forces and strong gas interaction make powder behaviour differ qualitatively from the behaviour of large, noncohesive grains. In this paper we investigate the implications of these two features on the bulk powder behaviour. More in particular, the aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between attractive interparticle forces at grain level, with solid bulk properties at low consolidations ( solid fraction, stresses), fluidization ( aggregation, settling) and flow regime boundaries ( plastic flow, inertial flow, fluidization and suspension). Many of the experimental results reported here are for dry and uncharged fine powders made of polymer particles of the order of 10 microns in diameter. However, the basic concepts and methodology are of general applicability.