Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-2-2020
Department
Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geospatial Engineering
Abstract
Granular materials are used directly or as the primary ingredients of the mixtures in industrial manufacturing, agricultural production and civil engineering. It has been a challenging task to compute the porosity of a granular material which contains a wide range of particle sizes or shapes. Against this background, this paper presents a newly developed method for the porosity prediction of granular materials through Discrete Element Modeling (DEM) and the Back Propagation Neural Network algorithm (BPNN). In DEM, ball elements were used to simulate particles in granular materials. According to the Chinese specifications, a total of 400 specimens in different gradations were built and compacted under the static pressure of 600 kPa. The porosity values of those specimens were recorded and applied to train the BPNN model. The primary parameters of the BPNN model were recommended for predicting the porosity of a granular material. Verification was performed by a self-designed experimental test and it was found that the prediction accuracy could reach 98%. Meanwhile, considering the influence of particle shape, a shape reduction factor was proposed to achieve the porosity reduction from sphere to real particle shape.
Publication Title
Applied Sciences
Recommended Citation
Liu, Y.,
Li, M.,
Su, P.,
Ma, B.,
&
You, Z.
(2020).
Porosity Prediction of Granular Materials through Discrete element method and back propagation neural network algorithm.
Applied Sciences,
10(5).
http://doi.org/10.3390/app10051693
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/michigantech-p/1798
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Version
Publisher's PDF
Publisher's Statement
© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Publisher’s version of record: https://doi.org/10.3390/app10051693