Development of a design methodology for hydraulic pipelines carrying rectangular capsules

Abstract

The scarcity of fossil fuels is affecting the efficiency of established modes of cargo transport within the transportation industry. Efforts have been made to develop innovative modes of transport that can be adopted for economic and environmental friendly operating systems. Solid material, for instance, can be packed in rectangular containers (commonly known as capsules), which can then be transported in different concentrations very effectively using the fluid energy in pipelines. For economical and efficient design of such systems, both the local flow characteristics and the global performance parameters need to be carefully investigated. Published literature is severely limited in establishing the effects of local flow features on system characteristics of Hydraulic Capsule Pipelines (HCPs). The present study focuses on using a well validated Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tool to numerically simulate the solid-liquid mixture flow in both on-shore and off-shore HCPs applications including bends. Discrete Phase Modelling (DPM) has been employed to calculate the velocity of the rectangular capsules. Numerical predictions have been used to develop novel semi-empirical prediction models for pressure drop in HCPs, which have then been embedded into a robust and user-friendly pipeline optimisation methodology based on Least-Cost Principle.

Effects of Guide Vane Placement Angle on Hydraulic Characteristics of Flow Field and Optimal Design of Hydraulic Capsule Pipelines

“…A 4.8 m long movement pipe was the scope of motion for the center of the piped carriage. The movement pipe was similar to that of Teke et al [40], Ulusarslan et al [28,41], and Asim et al [30,31]. The horizontal pipe section model was identical to the size of the test section in the experimental system.…”

“…In this article, the inlet cross-section and the outlet cross-section of the horizontal pipe model were set as the 'velocity inlet' and the 'pressure outlet', respectively, which were consistent with the boundary conditions that were set by Asim et al [30,31].…”

“…In recent years, the researchers have proposed a variety of the transport capsules. According to the corresponding different structural types, the capsules were divided into five categories such as a spherical capsule [28], a cylindrical capsule [10,14,30], a hexahedral capsule [31], a cylindrical capsule with wheels [37], and a cylindrical capsule with supports [22]. When transporting the materials in a 180 • pipe bend, the cylindrical capsule and the hexahedral capsule collided with the inner wall of its conveying pipes, which reduced the service life of the conveying pipes.…”

“…From Equations (31) and (40), the average axial speed of the piped carriage was strongly influenced by several factors like the average axial velocity of the pipe fluid, the diameter ratio of the piped carriage, the length of the barrel, the placement angle of the guide vane, the height of the guide vane, the length of the guide vane, and the flow resistance coefficient in the near-wall areas of the pipeline. This motion models were of vital significance for the analysis of the average axial speed of the piped carriage in Section 6.1.…”

“…Khalil et al [29] used three different turbulent models to develop a numerical solution for the fundamental equations governing turbulent flow around a single, concentric, long capsule in a pipe, which revealed the preliminary velocity distributions and pressure distributions of the internal flow field around the cylindrical capsules. Asim et al [30,31] conducted detailed numerical analysis on the hydraulic characteristics of fluids transporting rectangular and cylindrical capsules and proposed a semi-empirical model for predicting the pressure drop characteristics in HCPs. Further studies carried out by Li et al [32], who analyzed the hydraulic characteristics of transporting the cylindrical capsules by using commercial CFD software Flow-3D 9.3 within the pipelines.…”