Bi-power law correlations for sediment transport in pressure driven channel flows

Power law correlations for sediment transport in pressure driven channel flow was derived in the previous work of the authors. Those correlations can be used as predictive tools in the fracturing industry but they are in implicit forms. New data from slot experiments for fractured reservoir were collected which enable us to derive correlations in explicit forms and applicable over a wide range of data. In this paper we present correlations for bed load transport of slurries as a composition of bi-power laws in the proppant and fluid Reynolds number with exponents and prefactors expressed as logarithmic functions of dimensionless sedimentation numbers. The bed load transport correlations are very accurate and are apparently the only such in the published literature. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.