Prediction of Erosion Rate in Elbows for Liquid-Solid Flow via Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)

This paper predicts the effects of variety parameters such as particles size, stream velocities and elbows diameter on the erosion rate for an elbows in light crude oil-solid flow. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with commercially available FLUENT code (ANSYS 14.0) was applied to numerically predict erosion rate in elbows. Three separate models were used in CFD approach which are continuous flow modeling, Lagrangian particle tracking and empirical erosion equation. The ranges of parameters tested are 100-500 µm particles size, 3-7 m/s stream velocities and 0.0762-0.1778 m elbows diameter. From the results, maximum erosion rates increased with increasing size of particles and stream velocities and decreased with increasing elbows diameter. However, the location of the maximum erosion rate in elbows region was independent on those mentioned parameters.