ABSTRACT
When it is decided that experiments should be carried out in a test silo the choice of the kind of test silo is still open. Which silo is most suited depends on the objectives of the study (study of flow mechanism, determi nation of wall pressures, test of devices). Tests in full-scale (industrial) silos
have the advantage that no scale factors influence the test results. However, full-scale tests are usually very expensive and the properties of the test silo cannot easily be changed when one is interested in the influence of such changes on the test results. Several institutions and laboratories have test silos on model scale which are provided with a set of instrumentation. These are the facilities that are mostly used in the field of silo research. However, as for example with the flow behaviour of stored materials dependent on gravity forces, scale factors have to be used for the translation of results on scale models to full-scale results. Tests on model-scale silos placed in a centrifuge offer another possibility, but with other scale errors.
