Jae Bum Pahk and George E. Klinzing. Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, 1249 Benedum Hall, Pittsburgh, PA 15261
Dense phase pneumatic conveying is widely used to transport granular materials or powder due to its efficiencies gained on cost and abrasion and erosion. To date these systems have been designed and analyzed using average frictional representation for the conveyed plug. This study explorer the effect of this friction force at a single point by measuring strains on the pipe wall when the plug is moving passed the strain rosette installed directly in the inner pipe wall. Strains on axial and circumferential direction of plug flow measured from four different locations, top, bottom, front side, and back side of inner pipe wall. Dynamics strains with the sampling frequency of 10 KHz were measured by using data acquisition card with related software. In this study, comparison the magnitude of the strain under different plug velocity, plug length, and different material transported will be presented. It was found that the magnitude of the axial direction of strain was higher than the one for circumferential direction. The plug can now be models with realistic frictional representation of the conveyed plug.