Online Wear and Rheology Monitoring System for Backfill Paste Pipelines

Tailing resulted from mineral processing circuit is a waste material, and it is generally reused to produce underground backfill paste materials. Due to the addition of cement, the solids-liquid two-phase flow behaves as non-Newtonian fluid during pipeline transport. The resulting pipeline wear is also direct associated with the rheological properties of the fluid. This study aims to develop an integrated pipe wear and pressure monitoring system to investigate the rheological variation of the two-phase flow due to pipe wear and pressure fluctuation. The developed monitoring system was installed on a commercial backfill paste pipelines to collect the wear performance of the pipe. Non-Newtonian based computational fluid dynamics modelling was also conducted to examine the shear stress distribution, from which a wear evolution model was constructed for the selected piping system.