Comparative Evaluation of Some Existing Correlations to Predict Head Degradation of Centrifugal Slurry Pumps

Abstract

In order to optimally design a slurry transportation system, it is necessary to know how the presence of solids will change the performance of the slurry pump to be installed. This paper makes the comparison of some existing correlations available in the literature to predict the head reduction factors of such centrifugal pumps handling slurries. For this purpose, a large number of published data for various centrifugal slurry pump tests in the literature have been used to develop a new correlation and then this correlation and all others have been tested against the data. For the proposed correlation, the mean and average deviations between the calculated and measured head reduction factor is 8.378 and 0.620%, respectively, for all data of mostly handling commercial slurries. It also produces 12.441% mean deviation in the prediction of efficiency ratio for 216 data points. Overall, the new correlation that can be applied to both metal and rubber lined pumps with impeller diameter up to 850 mm, gives remarkably closer fit to the published data of both head and efficiency ratios than all existing correlations.

Use of cfd tool for improving design of centrifugal pump

“…Egin and Gur etc al 6 have evaluated some existing correlations to predict head degradation of centrifugal slurry pumps. A new correlation has been developed in order to predict head reductions of centrifugal pumps when handling slurries.…”

Prediction of relative efficiency reduction of centrifugal slurry pumps: Empirical- and artificial-neural network-based methods

“…It is generally accepted that both K H and K h are basically a function of concentration of solids (C W or C V ), specific gravity of solids (S), and representative diameter of particles d W in the pumped slurry [8,10,13,20]. A relatively recent paper by the present author indicated that the head reduction factor (K H ) could be better correlated with the ratio of the representative diameter of particle (d W ) to the outer diameter of the pump impeller (d 2 ) [13]. However, in this study, it was observed that the inclusion of impeller diameter into the analysis of efficiency reduction factor (K h ) could not provide accurate predictions.…”

“…Based on the procedure described briefly above, a Cþþ-based computer code has been written and all training tests have been performed on a personal computer. Before running the code, both input and output parameters were normalized within the (0.1 -0.9) range using P n ¼ 0:1 þ 0:8 P À P max P max À P min (13) where P n is the unified value of the corresponding parameter P, P max and P min denote the maximum and minimum values of parameter P, respectively. In order to compare the predicted values for different network parameters (such as learning rate, momentum coefficient, and the number of hidden units) and the desired values, the mean relative error defined by the following relation…”

“…On the other hand, a cost-effective slurry pumping operation requires the relative efficiency reduction of the pump installed in the pipeline to be predicted precisely since this is critically important in terms of operating and maintenance costs of the slurry transportation system. Although there are several correlations [5,8,10,13] for prediction of the relative head reduction of slurry pumps, no particular correlation is available in the literature for prediction of the relative efficiency reduction.…”

Influence of the Medium on Performance

“…In [46] a correlation was derived from the test data reported by various authors (in total 850 measuring points). Here, the head impairment is proportional to the mass concentration x, Eq.…”