Prediction of terminal velocity of solid spheres falling through Newtonian and non-Newtonian pseudoplastic power law fluid using artificial neural network

Prediction of the terminal velocity of solid spheres falling through Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids is required in several applications like mineral processing, oil well drilling, geothermal drilling and transportation of non-Newtonian slurries. An artificial neural network (ANN) is proposed which predicts directly the terminal velocity of solid spheres falling through Newtonian and non-Newtonian power law liquids from the knowledge of the properties of the spherical particle (density and diameter) and of the surrounding liquid (density and rheological parameters). With a combination of non-Newtonian data with Newtonian data taken from published data giving a database of 88 sets, an artificial neural network is designed. Analysis of the predictions shows that the artificial neural network could be used with good engineering accuracy to directly predict the terminal velocity of solid spheres falling through Newtonian and non-Newtonian power law liquids covering an extended range of power law values from 1.0 down to 0.06. ► Direct prediction of settling velocity in non-Newtonian liquid is not readily available. ► ANN has been used to directly predict settling velocities. ► Training and testing data sets were used from literature data. ► Predictions are good and comparable to two available equations for direct velocity estimation.