Abstract
Air lift pumps are regarded as one of the useful means of conveying liquid or solid particles. Accurate methods for estimating pump performance are required to carry out rational design of the pumps. Although several numerical methods to predict the pump performance have been already proposed, none of them are based on the multi-fluid model. Hence, a numerical method based on the multi-fluid model for steady gas-liquid-solid three-phase flow was proposed and examined in the present study. Since it had not been clear if the multi-fluid model could be applied to air lift pumps, pumps for lifting liquid were analyzed by implementing well-known correlations of the two-fluid model into the present method. It was confirmed by comparisons between calculated and available experimental data that the present method can predict the pump performance accurately under a wide range of flow conditions. In other words, the validity of the present method and the adopted correlations was confirmed. Then, a pump to lift solid particles was analyzed. Since there are few available correlations for the three-fluid model, correlations adopted in the analysis were tentative ones. However the present method gave relatively good predictions.
