TOWARDS A MULTI-ELEMENT SIMULATION OF HEAVILY OVER-CONSOLIDATED BAGASSE USING A MATERIAL SUBROUTINE
By F PLAZA
A BETTER UNDERSTANDING of the behaviour of prepared cane and bagasse, and the
ability to model the mechanical behaviour of bagasse as it is squeezed in a milling unit
to extract juice, would help identify how to improve the current process. There are
opportunities to decrease bagasse moisture from a milling unit. The behaviour of
bagasse in chutes is poorly understood. Previous investigations have shown that juice
flow through bagasse obeys Darcy’s permeability law, that the grip of the rough surface
of the grooves on the bagasse can be represented by the Mohr-Coulomb failure criterion
for soils, and that the internal mechanical behaviour of the bagasse is critical state
behaviour similar to that for sand and clay. Progress has been made in the past 11 years
towards implementing a mechanical model for bagasse in finite element software. The
objective is to be able to correctly simulate various simple mechanical loading
conditions measured in the laboratory. Combining these behaviours together is thought
to have a high probability of reproducing the complicated stress conditions in a milling
unit. This paper reports on progress made towards modelling the fifth and final (and
most challenging) of the simple loading conditions: the shearing of heavily overconsolidated bagasse, using a specific model for bagasse in a multi-element simulation.