Water Flows

Aeroprobe products have been successfully employed in water tunnels, towing tanks, channels and other hydrodynamic engineering facilities. An area that requires special fluid flow instrumentation can be found in mining applications. Ore processing machines like centrifuges or flotation cells operate with water often mixed with air to generate bubbles. Aeroprobe’s products have proven useful for both laboratory experiments on scaled-down models, as well as for full-size industrial machines.

For ventilation measurements, the difficulties center around the fact that the flows, naturally or artificially driven are very slow, and the direction of the motion can change either from location to location or from time to time. Aeroprobe's omni probes combined with modern very sensitive sensors are most appropriate for these applications.

The measurement of processing machines imposes difficulties that are not encountered in aerodynamic applications. This is because on many occasions, mining engineers are dealing with two-phase and three-phase flows. Some processes as discussed in the applications described in this page involve the separation of ore particles from the carrying medium. In such cases, two-phase flow consists of bubbly flow with very small bubbles. Finally, in flotation cells engineers have to deal with three-phase or even four-phase flows. This is because in the flotation process the three media are (i) water (ii) air bubbles and (iii) ore particles. As a fourth phase we can consider bubble/particle aggregates. Aeroprobe’s instruments have been used successfully so far in some cases involving single or two-phase flow in mining processing machines. Tools are still under development for the investigation and monitoring of three-phase and four-phase flows.