Rheological measurement of untreated sewage by straight tube

Sewage contains abundant low-grade heat energy, and recycling it using a heat pump system is an effective way to reduce carbon emissions. The particles in sewage will cause untreated sewage to exhibit non-Newtonian characteristics, and accurate rheological measurement is important for sewage transmission and distribution system design. The traditional rotary rheometer deforms, agglomerates, or breaks the solid particles in sewage, which affects the measurement results. Therefore, in this study, a horizontal tube rheological test bench was built for urban sewage. Constitutive equations and viscosity expressions of untreated and prepared urban sewage at different temperatures and particle concentrations were tested. The results show that untreated and prepared sewage conforms to the shear-thinning model of power-law fluids in non-Newtonian fluids even at particle wet mass concentration as low as 0.103%. The flow characteristic index n of sewage is unrelated to temperature, and its influence is mainly reflected in the consistency coefficient k. However, the sewage flow characteristic index n increases with a decrease in particle concentration. In the laminar flow range of 0.02–0.2 m/s, the flow resistance obtained by treating untreated sewage as a Newtonian fluid was approximately 1.36–1.99 times that of the non-Newtonian fluid model, which will result in a larger power system design and higher energy consumption. Under turbulent flow conditions, the drag coefficient of the Newtonian model was approximately 1.13 times that of the non-Newtonian model. This shows that when designing a sewage source heat pump system, the power-law fluid shear-thinning characteristics of untreated sewage must be fully considered, which helps reduce the calculated energy consumption of transportation.