Author(s)

Miller Jothi^1*, Redae Haimanot², Udaya Kumar³

¹School of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, Ethiopian Institute of Technology-Mekelle, Mekelle University, Ethiopia, Eastern Africa.
²Department of Mechanical Engineering, Adigrat University, Ethiopia, Eastern Africa.
³Department of Mechanical Engineering, BITS Pilani Dubai Campus, Dubai International Academic City, Dubai, UAE.

The carrier fluid (air or water) is used to transport solid material from the source place to its destination point through pipeline. Using air as carrier fluid to transport solid material through pipeline is called Pneumo transport, whereas transporting material with water or any other liquid through pipeline is called as hydraulic transport. A large number of installations are now available globally to transport solid materials to short, medium, and long distances using water/air as carrier fluid. However, the design of such system of pipeline is still an empirical art. In the present investigation, one generalized mathematical model developed by Shrivastava and Kar (SK Model) and CFD models were used and compared with experimental results for pneumatic and hydraulic transport of granular solids. The motivation of present work is to find the accuracy of SK model based on analytical, empirical and semi-empirical for the prediction of pressure drop and comparing the result with CFD based on mathematical equation for the mixture flow in the horizontal and vertical pipe lines. The comparison of pressure drop results obtained by using SK model and CFD model were validated with the experimental results for pneumatic and hydraulic transport of solids through. From the comparison results, it was observed that the results of pressure drop predicted by SK model are more accurate than the CFD models for all the cases considered.

Pressure Drop, SK Model, CFD Models, Hydraulic and Pneumatic Transport, Solid and Fluid Flow

Jothi, M. , Haimanot, R. and Kumar, U. (2019) Investigation on Pressure Drop of Fluid-Solid Mixture Flow through Pipes Using CFD and SK Model. Journal of Applied Mathematics and Physics, 7, 218-232. doi: 10.4236/jamp.2019.71018.