A CORRELATION TO PREDICT THE PERFORMANCE-CHARACTERISTICS OF CENTRIFUGAL PUMPS HANDLING SLURRIES

Centrifugal pumps are being used increasingly for transportation of sl urries through pipelines. To design a slurry handling system it is ess ential to have a knowledge of the effects of suspended solids on the p ump performance. A new correlation to predict the head reduction facto r for centrifugal pumps handling solids has been developed. This corre lation takes into account the individual effect of particle size, part icle size distribution, specific gravity and concentration of solids o n the centrifugal pump performance characteristics. The range of valid ity of the correlation has been verified by experiment and by using ex perimental data available from the literature. The present correlation shows better agreement with the experimental data than existing corre lations.