An Overview of Theories Describing Head Losses in Slurry Transport: A Tribute to Some of the Early Researchers

In dredging, the hydraulic transport of solids is one of the most important processes. Since the 50’s many researchers have tried to create a physical mathematical model in order to predict the head losses in slurry transport. One can think of the models of Durand and Condolios (1952) and Durand (1953), Worster and Denny (1955), Newitt et al. (1955), Gibert (1960), Fuhrboter (1961), Jufin and Lopatin (1966), Zandi and Govatos (1967) and Zandi (1971), Turian and Yuan (1977), Doron et al. (1987) and Doron and Barnea (1993), Wilson et al. (1992) and Matousek (1997). Some models are based on phenomenological relations and thus result in semi empirical relations, other tried to create models based on physics, like the two and three layer models. It is however the question whether slurry transport can be modeled this way at all. Observations in our laboratory show a process which is often non-stationary with respect to time and space. Different physics occur depending on the line speed, particle diameter, concentration and pipe diameter. These physics are often named flow regimes; fixed bed, shearing bed, sliding bed, heterogeneous transport and (pseudo) homogeneous transport. It is also possible that more regimes occur at the same time, like, a fixed bed in the bottom layer with heterogeneous transport in the top layer. It is the observation of the author that researchers often focus on a detail and sub-optimize their model, which results in a model that can only be applied for the parameters used for their experiments.