Frictional Head Loss of Various Bimodal Settling Slurry Flows in Pipe

Abstract Pipe flows of bimodal settling slurries exhibit frictional head losses quite different from those determined simply as a sum of loss contributions by the individual fractions. Mechanisms governing flow friction and resulting from an interaction of grains of different fractions in transported slurry are not well understood. This makes a prediction of the frictional head loss in flows of bimodal slurries with Newtonian carrier uncertain. An extensive experimental campaign was conducted in GIW Hydraulic Laboratory in 2016 with slurries of four narrow graded fractions of the virtually same grain densities and very different grain sizes (carrier-liquid fraction, pseudo-homogeneous-, heterogeneous-, and stratified fractions). Besides testing of the individual fractions, different combinations of the fraction mixtures (bimodal, three- and four-component) were tested as well. In our previous work published in 2018, we employed experimental results for bimodal slurry composed of coarse granite rock (the stratified fraction) and fine sand (the pseudo-homogeneous fraction) to analyze the observed considerable reduction of the frictional head loss caused by an addition of the fine sand to the granite rock slurry. In this work, we extend our analysis to the other bimodal slurries composed of permutations of the four fractions (in total 3 additional bimodal slurries) with a major objective to identify possible mechanisms leading to a modification of the frictional head loss due to an addition of a finer fraction to a coarser mono-disperse slurry, and to quantify this effect for the purposes of a predictive four-component model (4CM). The investigation shows that the frictional loss of bimodal slurry is always smaller than the theoretical loss obtained as the sum of losses of the fractions, although the massive reduction observed in the slurry composed of the stratified rock and fine sand is not observed in any other bimodal slurry. The investigation also suggests that the friction effect obtained by the finer fraction addition is due to different mechanisms for different bimodal slurries although all mechanisms are associated with altering mechanical friction due to granular contacts. It is shown that the observed effects can be well reproduced by the friction loss model 4CM, calibrated by the experimental data set from the 203-mm pipe and validated by the data set from the 103-mm pipe.