AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON A HORIZONTAL ENERGY-SAVING PNEUMATIC CONVEYING SYSTEM

In order to reduce power consumption and conveying velocity, a new pneumatic conveying system where soft fins are horizontally mounted on the center plane of pipe in the front of inlet is proposed in this paper. The experimental study focuses on the effect of the different fin's lengths on the horizontal pneumatic conveying system in terms of frequency characteristics of fin's oscillation, pressure drop, conveying velocity, power consumption and particle flow pattern. Comparing with the conventional pneumatic conveying, the pressure drop, minimum and critical velocities and power consumption can be reduced by using soft fins in lower air velocity range. The effective of fin is quite evident with increasing the length of fin. The maximum reduction rates of the minimum velocity and power consumption by using soft fins are about 14.8% and 25.5%, respectively. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.