Compared with steady tracking of ore particles, the transient tracking is preferred to predict the wear prediction of deep-sea mine pump. Via user-defined functions, the particles rebound model in ANSYS Fluent is corrected so that it can transiently track particles in a moving domain correctly. Two Euler - Lagrange coupled approaches, one of which takes inter-particle interaction into account during Lagrangian tracking and the other is not, are introduced in the simulation and their numerical results are compared. The comparisons show that the inter-particle interaction should be taken into account for Lagrangian tracking of densely distributed particles: the shielding effect makes particles more disperse in the pump, thereby avoiding the false concentration of erosive wear on the inner wall.
The global clean energy transition has created a huge demand for battery metals such as Li, Cu, Ni, Mn and Co. Polymetallic nodules, also known as manganese nodules, are widely distributed on the abyssal plains of the global oceans over a depth range of about 4000 -6000 m (Li, Li, Hein, Dong, Wang, Ren, Wu, Li and Chu, 2021). They are rich in critical and strategic metals, and provide a potential source of critical metals for sustaining human development for the foreseeable future (Hein, Koschinsky and Kuhn, 2020). Although there is no proven technology or equipment to mine these nodules, slurry pump and vertical pipelines might be the most viable options. The movement of ore particles has a great influence on the flow and the erosive wear on the inner wall of the pump, that is why particle tracking is an important basis for the study of improving the performance or the lifetime of the pump, as it
Based on simplified Euler-Lagrange (E-L) coupled approaches, some researchers solved the motion of sparse particles in slurry pumps by ignoring the inter-particle interaction and the transient characteristics of the impeller. Using the discrete phase model (DPM) in a commercial CFD software ANSYS Fluent, Wu (2010) studied the effects of particle size, blade parameters, rotational speed and other factors on the relative trajectories and impacting velocity of particles in a slurry pump. Pagalthivarthi, Gupta, Tyagi and Ravi (2011) studied the movement of sparse particles in the volute of centrifugal pump by using DPM two-way coupling, and qualitatively studied the influence of factors such as flow rate, rotational speed and volute geometric size on the erosive wear. Zou, Lu and Li (2013) used the Particle Transport Solid Model in the commercial software ANSYS CFX to solve the two-way coupling process of lifting manganese nodules in a two-stage deep-sea mining pump, and obtained pump characteristic curves and the distribution of particles in the pump.
