A Novel Pressure Drop Model for Seabed Airlift Devices Considering the Particle Sinking Effect

Long, H.; Wang, Z. N.; Wang, X. W.; Tran, C. T.

doi:10.47176/jafm.18.9.3324

A Novel Pressure Drop Model for Seabed Airlift Devices Considering the Particle Sinking Effect

Document Type : Regular Article

Authors

¹ Research Center of Big Data and Intelligent Decision Making, Hunan University of Science and Technology, Xiangtan, 411201, China

² Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of Health Maintenance for Mechanical Equipment, Hunan University of Science and Technology, Xiangtan, 4112013, China

³ School of Power and Mechanical Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China

⁴ Hydraulic Engineering department, Hanoi University of Civil Engineering - 55 Giai Phong, Hanoi, 100803, Vietnam

10.47176/jafm.18.9.3324

Abstract

Existing pressure drop model (PDM) ignores the particle sinking phenomenon in airlift devices and predict a much lower value than the actual one, which causes poor performance in the design and operation of airlift device. To solve this problem, a new PDM was proposed by considering this sinking phenomenon. Firstly, the particle sinking velocity in the airlift device was analyzed. Then, the phase volumetric fraction and phase velocity were calculated by considering this sinking effect. At last, a new pressure drop was derived from the calculated volumetric fractions and velocities. A distribution calculation method was proposed for calculating this new method and an experiment was conducted to verify the correctness of this new model. It was found that this new model has a high prediction accuracy with an error margin of 11%, which improves 12% compared with traditional models. This investigation proposed an accurate PDM and illustrated the effects of the particle sinking phenomenon on the hydrodynamics of gas liquid particle flow, which not only fills the gap in the PDM for ore airlift device, but also is beneficial to improve pump performance for high-efficiency transportation in ocean engineering.

Keywords

Main Subjects

Multiphase and Particle-Laden Flows

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