An Experimental and Numerical Analysis of Water Hammer Phenomenon in Slurries

Fine solid materials can be transported with the use of water as a carrier liquid. From the practical point of view, the economy of designing and maintenance is usually the most important factor. That way of transport has a lot of advantages for many industry processes. However, the problems of pressure flow are more complicated for slurries than for liquids. The transient flow is one of the most difficult problems to describe. A deep analysis of transients in slurries is crucial, both theoretically and practically. In this paper, the analysis of the transient flow in high-density polyethylene pressure pipelines is described. At the first stage, a laboratory model was build. Experiments made for different volume concentrations were performed. The results were used to build a numerical model of transient flow, which was the second stage of investigation. Due to relatively difficult description of the volumetric concentration bottom layer depth, these parameters vary in time and volume of slurry, and an alternative approach was proposed. The equivalent density was introduced to express the unknown parameters. Performed numerical simulations lead to promising results. In all analyzed episodes, the calculated pressure characteristics demonstrated satisfactory coincidence with observations.