In this paper, we propose a novel pipeline cleaning method utilizing slurry. The reason why slurry can be used for pipeline cleaning is that the collisions between the particles and the contaminant in the pipe wall can enhance the cleaning effect. A slurry with polypropylene particles embedded in water is used to cleaning a horizontal pipe is conducted to realize this method. Because the flow characteristics of the slurry is crucial for the cleaning process, it is valuable to conduct a simulation and investigate the influence of several different factors including the convey velocity and the particle size. A 3D CFD-DEM model has been established. The indicators including pressure loss, particle accumulation level at the top of the pipe are choses to characterize the slurry flow and the influence of convey velocity and particle size has been investigated accordingly. In addition, an effective method is proposed to determine the critical convey velocity for each size of the particle.
Modeling and numerical simulation of slurry flow
