Lifting technologies are used in sub-sea and underground mining for the transport of solids, as well as this oil well drilling operations require the management of vertically rising slurry flow. Monitoring and control of these processes are essential for minimizing energy wastage as well as avoiding pipeline blockages; however solid-liquid transport systems present considerable metering and visualization challenges. The coarse particle [ad en slurry is highly abrasive and opaque, and in addition the pipeline is required to be open bore and the measurement scheme non-intrusive. Currently there is no single device available commercially that can provide a complete metering solution of the transport process that is also not compromised in terms of measurement capability or by other process restraints. This thesis investigates a measurement technique capable of sensing essential transport variables for the determination of mass flow rate of slurry in-situ , by combining technologies electrical resistance tomography (ERT) with other auxiliary sensing technologies such as differential pressure measurement and an electromagnetic flow meter. The tandem function of these sensing technologies allows all unknown variables for determining the mass flow rate to be established, namely; solid phase concentration and velocity from cross correlation techniques, and liquid phase concentration and velocity. Experimentation has been conducted in a solids handling flow loop using silica sand in water as a medium to test the performance of the proposed measurement scheme. Slurry density and velocity measurements determined by electrical resistance tomography technique at various transport velocities and solids concentration are reported. A validation of the proposed measurement scheme is made against a newly designed measurement scheme comprising a load cell weigh system from which samples can be taken on line. The precision of the mass flow measurement, its potential application and future prospecting are discussed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:598039 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Munir, Basit |
| Publisher | University of Leeds |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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