Granular flow-solid wall interaction: investigation of the teapot effect

The evolution of granular flows generally involves solid boundaries, which add complexity to their dynamics and pose challenges to understand relevant natural and industrial phenomena. While an interesting “teapot effect” has been observed for liquid flowing over the solid surface of a teapot's spout, a similar phenomenon for discrete particles receives far less attention. In this work, we experimentally investigated the interactions between granular flows and a wedge-shaped solid edge (spout), showing that the trailing edge of the solid boundary plays a key role in causing velocity non-uniformity and splitting the flow into “dispersed” and “uniform” regions. Tuning the parameters (inclination angle, particle diameter, radii and surface roughness of the trailing edge) of the granular flow, a dimensionless number was summarized and successfully predicted the dispersion of the granular flows. Moreover, we also proved that introducing stronger cohesive forces between particles could harness the granular flows from heterogenous structures to grain clusters, which can be employed to switch between different flow regimes and regulate the dispersion behavior of particle flows. This study reveals the interaction of granular flow over complex solid boundaries, potentially offering new insights into particle-dominated flow dynamics.