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Updated: Jul 10, 2025

Fabrication and Operation of a Nano-Optical Conveyor Belt
Published on: August 26, 2015
Elongated particles discharged with a conveyor belt in a two-dimensional silo
Bo Fan1,2, Iker Zuriguel3, Joshua A Dijksman2,4
1Institute for Solid State Physics and Optics, Wigner Research Centre for Physics, P.O. Box 49, H-1525 Budapest, Hungary.
Abstract:
The flow of elliptical particles out of a two-dimensional silo when extracted with a conveyor belt is analyzed experimentally. The conveyor belt-placed directly below the silo outlet-reduces the flow rate, increases the size of the stagnant zone, and it has a very strong influence on the relative velocity fluctuations as they strongly increase everywhere in the silo with decreasing belt speed. In other words, instead of slower but smooth flow, flow reduction by belt leads to intermittent flow. Interestingly, we show that this intermittency correlates with a strong reduction of the orientational order of the particles at the orifice region. Moreover, we observe that the average orientation of the grains passing through the outlet is modified when they are extracted with the belt, a feature that becomes more evident for large orifices.
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