Bends pressure drop in hydraulic conveying

Hydraulic transport is a process in which solid particles are carried via liquid. In order to effectively design the system, the pressure drops, caused by the flow, through the various pipe elements have to be known. In this manuscript, an analysis of the flow within a horizontal bend element and the parameters affecting the pressure drops during hydraulic conveying is investigated. The predictive ability of Toda et al. (1972) correlation for a wide range of parameters was investigated. It was found that the correlation deviates from the experimental databases that were collected from the literature. Hence, a new empirical correlation was developed based on the experimental data using a linear multiple regression method. The pressure drops databased was further increased by modeling and simulation for an area that was not covered experimentally in the literature. Thus, verification of the new pressure drops empirical correlation was made with a wide database. The comparison showed that the new correlation deviation was 0.0304, compared to 0.103 with the Toda et al. (1972) correlation. In contrast to Toda et al. (1972) correlation, the newly developed correlation considers more parameters, e.g. pipe diameter and particles’ diameter, that affect the flow and bend pressure drop.