Subsea Mineral Resources and Flow Assurance for Air-lift Pumping Systems

Subsea minerals, such as seafloor massive sulfides, rare earth elements in deep-sea mud, are found deep sea within the exclusive economic zone of Japan. However, development subsea resources has not reached commercialization stage because many technical issues still need to be addressed. Then, efforts for solving these conducted Japan and other countries. Air-lift pumping systems one promising methods mineral resource productions. In developing air-lift systems, is flow assurance gas-liquid-solid three-phase flow. We reviewed correlations volume fractions frictional pressure drops gas-liquid liquid-solid two-phase flows proposed flows. carried out some experiments obtained data each phase drops. To validate correlation, we compared calculated results by with experimental data. The comparison suggested that fraction gas-phase could correlations. Meanwhile, deviations between solid-phase was large new were needed them.