Pressure Loss Calculation Model for Well-graded Solid-liquid Pipe Flows on the Basis of Systematic Pilot Plant Investigations

At designing pipeline transport of granulated solid materials, one of the most important parameter is the pressure loss over a given length of pipe. The pressure loss determines the applicable pump as well as the main portion of the operational costs. In the practice the transported solids can be characterized by size, density and shape distributions. Still many of the existing great number of pressure drop calculation methods describe mono-disperse solids. When solids are transported in horizontal pipelines by steady-state slurry flow, the most complicated case of interest of calculating the head loss is the flow of smaller flow rates (sliding bed flow may occur because operating the system close to the minimum point means low energy cost) of slurries with well granulated real solid material. The aim of this paper is to cope with this problem.