A numerical study of developing slurry flow in the entrance region of a horizontal pipe

In this paper, a simplified 3-D algebraic slip mixture (ASM) model was introduced to obtain the numerical solution in sand–water slurry flow. In order for the study to obtain the precise numerical solution in fully developed turbulent flow, the RNG k–ε turbulent model was used with the algebraic slip mixture model. An unstructured (block-structured), non-uniform grid was chosen to discretize the entire computation domain, and a control volume finite difference method (CVFDM) was applied to solve the governing equations. The mean pressure gradients from the numerical solution in the fully developed turbulent flow were compared with the authors’ experimental data and that in the open literature to validate the simulation results. The solutions were found to be in good agreement with the experimental data. The numerical investigations have focused mainly on illustrating and comparing the developing processes of volume fraction and density distributions, mean velocity profiles, and mean skin friction coefficient distributions in the entrance region. It was found that the difference of friction factors between single- and double-species slurries increases along flow direction in most part of the entrance region.