The flow of granular materials is common to many industrial processes. This paper discusses a methodology which utilizes high speed digital imaging to measure velocity of dry granular solids flowing down an inclined chute under the action of gravity. ...
The flow of granular materials is common to many industrial processes. This paper discusses a methodology which utilizes high speed digital imaging to measure velocity of dry granular solids flowing down an inclined chute under the action of gravity. Glass and acrylic particles have been used as granular solids in our experiment. One technique utilizes block matching for spatially averaged velocity measurements of the glass particles. Another technique for measuring the velocities of individual acrylic particles is developed with correspondence using the Hopfield network. This latter technique first locates the positions of particles with variance normalized correlation as a pattern recognition technique, followed by a clustering technique, which produces point patterns. Then, correspondence between successive point patterns is solved by a Hopfield network for the velocity measurements of individual particles. The velocity measurements are refined to the subpixel resolution by the variance normalized correlation with interpolation in both techniques.