A magnetic thermostat employing soft-ferromagnetic particles and a varying magnetic field has been developed to investigate a homogeneous granular gas system in microgravity. While the thermostat’s mechanism of creating homogeneous distribution of the particles was shown earlier, its characteristics have not been understood well due to limited access to a microgravity environment. Therefore, a parametric study by numerical simulation based on the discrete element method is carried out in this paper to evaluate effects of tunable parameters in the thermostat. The result shows the capability of the system and provides a wide range of options and improvements for future experiments. Moreover, it predicts that the thermostat allows variation of homogeneity and excitation level of the granular gas just by changing the magnetic parameters without using any mechanical means. In addition, the suggested improvement is experimentally implemented and evaluated in a drop tower test.

已经开发出一种利用软铁磁颗粒和变化磁场的磁性恒温器，以研究微重力下的均匀颗粒气体系统。尽管较早显示了产生颗粒均匀分布的恒温器机制，但由于对微重力环境的访问有限，人们对它的特性还不太了解。因此，本文进行了基于离散元方法的数值模拟参数研究，以评估恒温器中可调参数的影响。结果显示了系统的功能，并为将来的实验提供了广泛的选择和改进。此外，它预测恒温器仅通过改变磁参数而无需使用任何机械手段就可以改变粒状气体的均匀性和激发水平。另外，建议的改进是通过实验实现的，并在落塔测试中进行了评估。