TWO-PHASE FLOW OF HIGHLY CONCENTRATED SLURRY IN A PIPELINE

Hydraulic transport of sand is one of the key processes in river, lake, harbor and waterway dredging engineering. Understanding the flow resistance, solid distribution, flow stratification, transport economy, etc., in the two-phase flow of sand-water mixture through a pipeline is crucial to the design and operation of power drives of a dredger, and to the construction of a dredging project. This paper presents the intensive laboratory experimental data and physical and numerical analyses on the highly concentrated slurry flow under an extended large range of slurry mean velocities for three narrow-graded sands of different sizes. The investigation indicates that the solids concentration and particle size strongly affect the slurry flow characteristics.