DILUTE PHASE VERTICAL PNEUMATIC CONVEYING OF CORK STOPPERS

The pneumatic conveying of cork stoppers is used in the cork processingindustries with equipments designed and built purely on an empirical basis.Experimental studies to characterize this type of pneumatic transportationhave been, so far, oriented towards the study of horizontal conveying processes, either for steady state transportation or for the acceleration zone.However studies were carried out on the determination of the pressure dropon vertical transportation of cork stoppers. Here the experimental apparatusand procedure are described, and the first experimental data that have beenobtained are shown. In consequence a simple correlation for the pressure drop in the steady state region of the conveying pipe is proposed. Thecorrelation is a function of dimensionless parameters used to characterizethe two phase flow under analysis. Three standard stoppers sizes and a single pipe diameter were used in the experiments, all carried out at ambient temperature