Transport of ice slurry in the pipelines of central air conditioning systems in mining plants

The paper presents the phenomena accompanying the processes of non-adiabatic transport of ice slurry with ice mass fraction values below 20% in the transport sections of the system, assuming the conditions of significant changes in hydrostatic pressure. The subject of the analysis presented herein was to indicate the influence of hydrostatic pressure values on melting and secondary recrystallisation phenomena in the case of medium expansion in a vertical shaft pipeline and a three-chamber PES distributor. The paper proposes a computational model to determine the mass fraction of ice in the downstream section of the supply system: upstream and downstream of the PES distributor. The presented calculation results indicate that a reduction in the mass fraction of ice in the range of 0.004% per 1 m of the pipeline could be observed in vertical shaft pipelines. Maximising the enthalpy flux of the slurry at the inlet to the secondary circuit and minimising the temperature of the return water to the chiller favours mixing rates in the PES three-chamber distributor below 7%, which increase as the mass fraction of ice decreases.