A fast first order model of a rough annular shear cell using cellular automata

The motivation of the current work is to simulate granular phenomena in a rough annular shear cell without load using a physics-based cellular automata (CA) modeling approach. A simple yet powerful two-dimensional (2D) cellular automata model was developed to model granular flows inside a 2D annular shear cell from a tribological perspective. Physics-based equations developed from first-principles to model collisions have been adopted to form the cellular automata local rules of interaction. This combines the computational efficiency of CA modeling with the accuracy and generalization of first-principle physics modeling. The local flow properties-solid fraction, velocity and granular temperature profiles- were predicted from the CA simulation and compared to the granular shear cell experiments. The resulting steady-state CA model profiles show good agreement with the experimental results. The ability of the CA model to probe the effect of each granular flow property is demonstrated by performing parametric studies of the particle-particle coefficient of restitution and roughness factor.