CFD investigation of the flow characteristics of liquid–solid slurry in a large-diameter horizontal pipe. (18th August 2021) - Zhang, Mengda
Abstract: As an efficient and environmentally friendly method of delivering solid particles, the transport of liquid–solid slurry through a pipeline has attracted considerable attention. However, the flow characteristics of the slurry in large-diameter pipes, especially multi-sized slurry, are far from fully understood. In this study, an Eulerian multiphase model is applied to investigate single- and multi-sized slurry flows in horizontal pipes. The results show that the pipe diameter has a distinct effect on the particle distribution and that the flow properties of multi-sized slurry are different from those of single-sized slurry. In the 900-mm pipe, the variations in the solid concentration and velocity distributions of single-sized slurry are significantly affected by the particle size and efflux concentration but display weak dependence on the mixture velocity. The total particle concentration profile of the multi-sized slurry becomes relatively symmetric in the upper half of the pipe and highly asymmetric in the lower half with increasing mean particle size. The pressure drop per meter of the single-sized slurry first decreases and then increases with increasing particle size, and the pressure drop of the multi-sized slurry containing coarse particles is much higher than that of the single-sized slurry under the same working conditions.