DESIGN OF PIPELINES TO TRANSPORT NEUTRALLY BUOYANT CAPSULES

Pipe:line transport of solids containerized in capsules has several at tractive features. As compared to slurry transport: the cargo is not w etted or contaminated by the carrier fluid; no mechanism is required t o separate the transported material from the fluid other than the use of capsules; and foremost, it requires less power for maintaining the flow. Although considerable research work has appeared in the last thr ee decades, design equations have not been attempted as yet. In this p aper the design of a capsule transporting pipeline has been formulated as a geometric programming problem. The solution of the problem yield ed the design variables in the form of explicit equations.