Intermittent granular flow and clogging with internal avalanches

The dynamics of intermittent granular flow through an orifice at the bottom of a granular bin and the associated clogging due to formation of arches b locking the outlet, is studied numerically in two dimensions. When the hole size is less than the grain diameter, only a single grain is removed from the system so that the system self-organizes to a steady state and the dist ribution of the grain displacements decays as power laws. On the other hand , when hole sizes are within few times of the grain diameter, the outflow d istributions are also observed to follow a power law.