Numerical Analysis of Sand-Water Slurry Flow through Horizontal Pipeline for Various Particle Size at High Velocity

This present study represents a numerical analysis of sand water slurry flow considering different sand particle sizes through horizontal pipeline of 5.5m length and 103 mm diameter at high velocity. Computational fluid dynamics was used for the numerical simulation; Eulerial two phase model was selected for modeling the multiphase flow and RNG K-epsilon model was adopted for modeling the turbulent flow. 90µm, 150µm and 270µm sand particle (Sp. Gravity 2.65) sizes were considered for this present study for a mixture flow velocity of 5.4m/s at various solid volumetric concentration levels (20%, 30% and 40%). The behaviour of various flow parameters viz. concentration distributions, velocity distributions and pressure drop were analyzed from the numerically simulated results. The influence of particle size and solid volumetric concentrations on various flow parameters were analyzed in this study. Finally the simulated results of pressure drop were validated with the experimental data available in previous literature. Keywords: 3-D CFD modeling, Slurry flow, Eulerian model, RNG K-epsilon model, Concentration distribution, Velocity distribution, Pressure drop.