A Unified Scaling-Up Technique for Pneumatic Conveying Systems

A major challenge facing the designers of pneumatic transportation systems is how to scale up reliably based on the results from pilot-scale test facilities. Further, even if dense phase flow condition prevails at the start of the conveying system, it may be a dilute phase flow condition at the end of the pipeline. Hence, any scaling-up technique should be able to address the dynamic change of flow condition along the pipeline. The scaling-up technique presented here using the pressure drop prediction models based on modified Darcy-Weisbach equation successfully addresses these dynamic changes. It has been shown that the pressure drop coefficient ‘K,’ as defined by the models, is independent of the pipe diameter. Further, in the case of vertical conveying, ‘K’ has been shown to be independent of particle size distribution for a given material. The predicted pressure values were found to be in reasonably good agreement with the experimental results varying from 3.5% to 19.9%.