Terminal settling velocity for binary irregularly shaped particle mixture from fluidization study: experiment, empirical correlation, and GA-ANN modeling

For precise prediction of the free settling velocities of the solid particle in the quiescent, the Newtonian fluid has been used for different liquid-particle systems, e.g., mineral processing, slurry pipelines, solid-liquid separation, and drilling. This study determined terminal settling velocity (TSV) from the fluidized bed experiments for binary particle mixture of the irregularly shaped particle and water as fluid. The influence of the particle diameter of the binary mixture on TSV was explored. Finally, a simple correlation was proposed to estimate the TSV for a binary mixture of irregular-shaped particles compared with the previously reported correlation in literature. TSV was also predicted with the help of a hybrid of genetic algorithm and artificial neural network (GA-ANN) model.