Abrasion erosion modeling in particulate flow

Solid particle erosion is of great importance to many industries including oil and gas production, drilling, process and transportation of minerals including oil sands. The particles that may cause erosion are of various sizes, shapes and hardnesses. These particles may impact the surface at various speeds and angles, and the influence of these parameters is characterized to some extent in the literature. Experimental and numerical studies have shown that when particles are transported by liquid (e.g. slurry transport in the pipe) or dense gas, the particle impact angles are very low. The impact angles in these cases are sometimes less than the smallest value that can be obtained in a direct impingement erosion test in gas. In this work, the mechanistic erosion equation developed previously is extended to near zero impact angles for sharp particles. The abrasion erosion equation is developed by introducing an initial penetration of the sharp particle in the equation of the motion. This initial penetration may be attributed to the sharp particle rotation and/or turbulent flow fluctuations of the carrier fluid near the wall. The empirical constants are obtained from submerged erosion experiments in liquid. The equation has been implemented in a commercially available Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code (ANSYS FLUENT) to calculate erosion for a submerged impingement jet geometry, and the result is compared with the experiment. It is shown that by neglecting the abrasive term in the erosion equation, the specimen mass loss does not match the experimental measured mass loss. While by including the abrasive term, the total mass loss of the specimen agrees well with the experimental data. Moreover, the erosion pattern becomes closer to the experimentally measured pattern especially farther from the center of the highly eroded area where abrasive wear is expected to dominate.