Drift-flux modeling of hyper-concentrated solid-liquid flows in dredging applications

Abstract

Transporting large amounts of sand is mostly done hydraulically in dredging and mining. This method of sand transport is efficient and is used in land reclamation projects or extraction of oil from tar sands. Large pieces of equipment, such as pumps and pipe line systems, dredging vessels etc., are used enabling the sand water mixtures to be transported hydraulically. Therefore, a good understanding of the hydrodynamical behavior of sand water mixtures is eminent in order to further improve these kind of systems. In this thesis a numerical model has been developed which describe the hydraulic behavior of sediment fluid mixtures. In the model the volume concentration of solids varies from 0.0 to 0.6. Moreover, the model is able to describe mixtures consisting of multiple sized sand particles.