Influence factors of pressure loss in pipeline transportation of paste slurry

A new pipe loop test platform was built to study the influence factors and levels of pressure loss in slurry pipe transportation. The influences of pipe inner-diameter, flow velocity, slurry concentration and particle size on the pressure loss were investigated. It is found that the influence of flow velocity on the pressure loss can be divided into two stages:when the flow velocity is less than the viscous transition flow rate, the pressure loss increases linearly with the increasing of flow velocity;but when the flow velocity is greater than the viscous transition velocity, the pressure loss increases in linear to quadratic polynomials with the increase of flow velocity, and the increasing rate is greater than that of flow velocity. The pressure loss negative-power decreases with the increasing of pipe diameter, but it exponentially increases with increasing slurry concentration. Under the same working condition, the pressure loss of fine-grained slurry is greater than coarse-grained slurry, the viscous transition velocity of fine-grained slurry is larger, but the in-crease in pressure loss of fine-grained slurry with flow velocity is relatively slow.