Abstract
The purposes of this study are to obtain designing data and safety operational conditions for air-lift pumps of lifting marine mineral resources such as maganese nodules from deep-sea floor of about 5, 000m to a mining ship. A large amount of air is absorbed into water, because the air is injected in a deeper position of conveying pipe at high pressure; therefore, the numerical procedure based on the drift flux model for steady gas-liquidsolid three-phase flow takes account of the mass transfer between gas-phase and liquid-phase.In this paper, we discuss effects of several factors, such as coefficients of the constitutive equations; air absorption into water; inner diameter, wall roughness and length of each section of conveying pipe; pressure drop coefficients; physical properties and delivered concentration of solid particles on flow characteristics. The results of this numerical simulation serve a basic performance of a large scale air-lift pump.
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