Granular materials demonstrate complexity in many physical attributes with various shapes and sizes, varying from several centimeters down to less than a few microns. Some materials are highly cohesive, while others are free-flowing. Despite such complexity in their physical properties, they are extremely important in industries dealing with bulk materials. Through this research, the factors affecting flowability of particulate solids and their interaction with projectiles were explored. In Part I, a novel set of characterization tools to relate various granular material properties to their flow behavior in confined and unconfined environments was investigated. Through this work, a thorough characterization study to examine the effects of particle size, particle size distribution, and moisture on bulk powder flowability were proposed. Additionally, a mathematical model to predict the flow function coefficient (FFC) was developed, based on the surface mean diameter and moisture level, which can serve as a flowability descriptor. Part II of this research focuses on the impact dynamics of low velocity projectiles on granular media. Interaction of granular media with external foreign bodies occurs in everyday events like a human footprint on the beach. Several studies involving numerical and experimental methods have focused on the study of impact dynamics in both dry and wet granular media. However, most of the studies involving impact dynamics considered spherical projectiles under different conditions, while practical models should involve more complex, realistic shapes. Different impacting geometries with conserved density, volume, and velocity on a granular bed may experience contrasting drag forces upon penetration. This is due to the difference in the surface areas coming into contact with the granular media. In this study, a set of non-spherical geometries comprising cuboids, cylinders, hexagonal prisms and triangular prisms with constant density, volume, and impact velocities, were released onto a loosely packed, non-cohesive, dry granular bed. From these experimental results, a model to determine the penetration depth of projectiles upon impact was developed and how it is influenced by the release height and surface area of the projectiles in contact with the granular media was studied.

This thesis investigates the effects of differing diameters, removal of antistatic forces, and varying moisture content on the shear stress properties of granular glass beads through use of a Freeman FT4 Powder Rheometer. A yield locus results from plotting the experimental shear stress values (kPa) vs. the applied normal stress value (kPa). From these yield loci, Mohr’s Circles are constructed to quantitatively describe flowability of tested materials in terms of a flow function parameter.

By testing 120-180 µm, 120-350 µm, 250-350 µm, and 430-600 µm dry glass bead ranges, an increase in diameter size is seen to result in both higher shear stress values and an increasing slope of plotted shear stress vs. applied normal stress. From constructed Mohr’s Circles, it is observed that flow function is quite high amongst tested dry materials, all yielding values above 20. A high flow function value (>10) is indicative of a good flow.1 Flow function was observed to increase with increasing diameter size until a slight drop was observed at the 430-600 µm range, possibly due to material quality or being near the size limitation of testing within the FT4, where materials must be less than 1000 µm in diameter.However, no trend could be observed in flowability as diameter size was increased.

Through the use of an antistatic solution, the effect of electrostatic forces generated by colliding particles was tested. No significant effect on the shear stress properties was observed.

Wet material testing occurred with the 120-180 µm glass bead range using a deionized water content of 0%, 1%, 5%, 15%, and 20% by mass. The results of such testing yielded an increase in shear stress values at applied normal stress values as moisture content is increased, as well as a decrease in the resulting flow function parameter. However, this trend changed as 20% moisture content was achieved; the wet material became a consistent paste, and a large drop in shear stress values occurred along with an increase in flowability.

In today's high demand energy industry, oil shale is becoming an increasingly sought-after fossil fuel source, deviating from the more conventional fuel sources. Investigating imbibition, which is the uptake of liquids into porous material, provides potential solutions to common industry issues that occur during hydraulic fracturing of shale rock. Particle characterization tests were performed on industrial shale samples cleaned with methanol only, chloroform only, and a mixture of methanol and chloroform. The purposes of these chemicals were for salt extraction, hydrocarbon extraction, and the extraction of both impurities respectively. These characterization tests included bulk and tap density tests, Malvern Mor- phologi G3SE tests for circle equivalent diameter (particle size distribution), high sensitivity circularity, and elongation, Freeman Technology FT4 Powder Rheometer tests for bulk flowability and compressibil- ity, and sessile drop experiments using deionized water, hexane, and silicone oil for hydrophobicity and contact angle measurements. Results show that the methanol cleaned sample had the largest particle size distribution and largest number of symmetrical particles while the chloroform and methanol/chloroform cleaned samples showed similar results with a smaller particle size distribution and more elliptically shaped particles. Based on this, the methanol cleaned sample had the highest compressibility due to the large number of void fractions between the large particles and the smaller particles fitting within these voids. All three samples were highly hydrophobic and showed similar behaviors in the sessile drop tests.

This research investigated deionized water contact angle measurement reliability with alumina powder using the Washburn method. This method relates the capillary rise of a liquid through a column of packed powder to the contact angle of the system. A reference liquid that is assumed to be perfectly wetting, such as hexane due to the low surface energy, must be used to compare to the tested liquid. Consistency was hypothesized to be achieved with more powder structure and consistency of packing between reference and test trials. The three types of packing structures explored in this study were unstructured, visually-structured (user tapped), and machine-structured tapping. It was also hypothesized that similar contact angle results would be found for different packing methods of the same powder and liquid. However, the average contact angle for unstructured packing was found to be 32.9°, while the angle for the tapped structure was only 11.7°. This large deviation between types of packing shows that there are more inconsistencies with the use of this method than just the regulation of the packing structure. There were two similar glass chromatography columns used, but the second column experienced an unknown interference that led to a delay in the hexane uptake into the powder, which then led to invalid contact angle calculations. There was no discernible relationship between the packing structure and the standard deviation between trials, so the more structured packing does not seem to affect the consistency of results. It is recommended to perform more experiments on a single packing type with different apparatuses and a narrower particle size range.