Falling Concrete Impact
Bremar recently completed a project which involved simulating the impact of wet concrete falling 150m into a hopper in an underground mine.
The objective of the analysis was to assess the strength of the hopper and determine whether it could withstand the proposed impact of the falling cement, which is travelling at nearly 200km/h when it hits the hopper.
For this analysis, we used Altair Radioss to perform a Finite Element Analysis (FEA), and a simulation technique called Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) to represent the wet cement. SPH basically represents incompressible fluids as multiple smooth spheres that can contact each other and other structures in an FEA analysis. The animations below show some of the results from the analysis:
As a result of the simulations, we were able to suggest a number of design improvements to increase the strength of the hopper and increase its longevity under such extreme loads. We were also able to use the SPH results to determine a simpler approximation of the impact loads, saving our clients time and money for future hopper designs.
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