Effect of Air Injector on the Airlift Performance in Air-Water-Solid Three-Phase Flow
Publication: Journal of Energy Engineering
Volume 140, Issue 1
Abstract
To understand the effect of an air injector on airlift performance, an experimental study of the influence of air exit-port arrangement on the mass flow rate of solids and lifting efficiency was performed. An airlift with a riser 1,500-mm long and 40-mm diameter was designed and tested. At a constant submergence ratio, the mass flow rate of solids and lifting efficiency were significantly affected by the air exit-port arrangement. As the air flow rate increased, the mass flow rate of solids increased to a maximum value and then decreased slightly. The curve relating the air flow rate to lifting efficiency was -shaped, i.e., it contained two local maxima. The air flow rate at the second efficiency maximum was approximately equal to the air flow rate at which the solid mass flow rate was maximal. When the measurement results were expressed in dimensionless form, the relation between the volume flow of slurry and air flow rate was approximately the same for all air exit-port arrangements, and was in good agreement with a theoretical model that was presented based on the Bernoulli equation.
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Acknowledgments
This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51374101), the Projects of Hunan Province Science and Technology Department (Grant No. 2013SK3165), and the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province (Grant No. 13JJ9013). The authors would like to thank Mr. Shuo Shen, Man Liu and Xiaoting He, who are undergraduate master students at Hunan University of Technology, for their faithful help in the experiments.
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Published In
Journal of Energy Engineering
Volume 140 • Issue 1 • March 2014
Copyright
© 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Mar 2, 2013
Accepted: May 17, 2013
Published online: May 20, 2013
Published in print: Mar 1, 2014
Discussion open until: May 3, 2014
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