A Comprehensive Procedure to Estimate Erosion in Elbows for Gas/Liquid/Sand Multiphase Flow

A comprehensive procedure that combines mechanistic analysis and numerical simulation approaches is proposed to estimate the erosion in elbows for gas/liquid/sand particle multiphase flow systems. The erosion problem in multiphase flow is approximately transferred to one in single-phase flow by introducing the effective sand mass ratio and a representative single-phase flow to which a single-phase computational-fluid-dynamics-based erosion-prediction model can be applied. Erosion in elbows is calculated for various multiphase flow patterns and compared to experimental data in the literature. Reasonable agreement between the simulations and the literature data is observed. The proposed approach is an effective tool to estimate the erosion in multiphase flow.