Constitutive Equations For Crushed Coal

Reliable prediction of wall pressures in a coal silo demands careful characterization of the stress-strain properties of the coal. This paper describes the results of triaxial compression tests on a typical fine-ground coal used in power generation and describes the fitting of several different constitutive models to the data. The fitted parameters for the constitutive models are well suited to application infinite element analyses. The different models are used to give the reader flexibility in choosing a model and to show the shortcomings of some models. To explore the quality of the fitting process, the fitted results are compared with finite element predictions of the triaxial test itself.