Grain shear flow in a rotating drum

 In the present paper we report on the experimental activities carried out on a rotating drum partially filled with grains or glass beads. The experiments give information about rheology through velocity profiles and through the velocity covariance tensor structure. We used a LDV system to measure the velocity of the grains at several points along three vertical sections. The data were also used to obtain the grain volume concentration, with encouraging results. Instantaneous velocity data were elaborated in order to obtain velocity and pseudotemperature profiles for all the experiments; for a subset of the experiments a large set of data were elaborated to obtain the velocity covariance. The velocity covariance is not collinear with the rate of deformation tensor. An attempt to justify the rotation of the tensor axes as a consequence of the kinetically induced anisotropy and of some free surface perturbations slowly moving upstream was partially successful. Received: 23 April 1999 / Accepted: 15 July 2001