Abstract
Detailed observations in a slurry transparent horizontal loop of the sand transport deposition regime, ranging from fully suspended particles to bed motion as a train of dunes, are reported. Deposition, or scouring, is known as a deleterious sand transport regime in view of pipeline erosion. The two velocity thresholds limiting the deposition regime: the critical sand-carrying velocity threshold or deposition threshold below which particles begin to deposit, and the minimum conveying velocity threshold, below which particles cannot be suspended anymore and self-organize into dunes, span about 20 % of the bulk velocity such that detection of the beginning of the deposition provides a margin of safety before accumulation risks. Observed moving, snaking structures are likely to be the actors of the reckoned erosion on pipelines bottom in this scouring regime. From a digital treatment of the videos of the deposited particles, the deposition regime presents a salient characteristic: a consistent increase in the number of detected entities as the bulk velocity decreases down to a brutal trend inversion once all particles are eventually deposited and self-organise and hide into dunes. The findings are, in a first approximation, independent of the sand size and concentration, for the cases considered, and provide a basis for the design of monitoring methods for systematic detection of the deposition regime.
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Acknowledgments
The authors express their appreciation to the CSIRO technical staff for their assistance in conducting the experiments. The contribution of Dr. Robert Stewart in performing initial image analysis is gratefully acknowledged. This work was supported by CSIRO appropriation funding from the Minerals Down Under Flagship. Journal editorial reviewers as well as internal CSIRO reviewers are acknowledged for their contribution to the improvement of the manuscript.
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Appendix
The acquisition was facilitated by an optical set-up designed such that the deposited particles were enhanced in the picture, compared to the suspended ones, by putting the focal plane of the camera at the pipe floor level (Sect. 4). The pictures were then digitally sharpened. The particles boundaries were identified from morphological processing followed by segmentation typical of blob detection. Particles were directly counted from the blobs found. It must be remarked that the images were obtained as frames of videos of standard quality and the definition of the particles border was under-resolved such that incomplete blob frontiers or clumps were identified. The counting of blobs therefore did not follow exactly quantitatively the number of deposited particles captured within the camera window but this did not damage the identification of the robust trends associated with the types of transport regimes. Frame extraction from the videos was performed at a specific constant rate. It was checked that this rate was high enough to correctly follow the evolution in the number of deposited particles sweeping the camera window. Processing of a frame took 190-200 ms for the resolution used (640x480) on a standard desktop I7 CPU, 4GB RAM workstation.
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Boulanger, J.A.R., Wong, C.Y. Sand suspension deposition in horizontal low-concentration slurry pipe flows. Granular Matter 18, 15 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10035-016-0616-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10035-016-0616-2