Experimental Investigation on Flow Behavior of Paste Slurry Transported by Gravity in Vertical Pipes

In order to dispose of large quantities mineral tailings, paste backfill is proposed and widely adopted. Paste backfill, which has high concentration yield stress behaves as a non-Newtonian fluid, prepared at the surface plant then transported underground. Vertical pipelines are more likely suffer various failures, such pipe breaks, wear plugging, during transport process. Few present studies focus on flow behavior slurry flowing in vertical pipes. this work, two L-shaped pipeline systems with internal diameters (ID) 40 mm 65 electrical resistance tomography (ERT) were manufactured visualize regimes measure axial velocity pressure upper lower zones Flow extracted from ERT-reconstructed images stacked by time-series. Based this, four typical summarized, characteristics change depth discussed.