Power consumption of hydraulic transport of products of mineral processing
- 1 — Ph.D., Dr.Sci. professor National Mineral Resources University (Mining University)
- 2 — professor University of Environmental and Life Sciences
Abstract
The problem of decreasing power consumption by hydraulic transport systems remains to be the most important among other problems in the mining industry. The increase of solid material concentration in the volume of transported pulp leads to reduction of general pulp flow rate on the one hand and to increase of pressure losses and, accordingly, of a necessary head for over-coming hydraulic resistance on the other hand. The problem of minimizing power consumption in slurry transport is of particular relevance now when there is a tendency for hydraulic transport of highly-concentrated pulps and pastes to be widely used in the mining industry. The article shows that the energy intensity to a certain extent depends on the performance of hydraulic transport of solid materials, and this dependence is of extreme nature. At low concentra-tions of solid particles large volumes of recycled water have to be pumped to provide the neces-sary performance, which leads to consumption of large amounts of electricity. The increase оf concentration results in the decrease in the volumetric flow rate of the pulp and, accordingly, spe-cific power consumption of the process. The process of reducing energy consumption takes place up to a certain critical value of the concentration above which a further increase in the concentra-tion raises power consumption.