An integrated methodology for predicting material wear rates due to erosion

Erosion–corrosion damage within pipelines and associated fluid handling equipment is prevalent in the oil and gas sector and other process industries where solid-laden flows, such as those involved in the processing of oil sands are found. As a first step towards trying to understand the interactions between erosion and corrosion it is important to understand the erosion damage that occurs as a result of solid particle impact on a surface (usually metal). This paper addresses this in relation to transport of fluids in the oil-sands industry. A method for predicting erosion damage has been developed, using a combination of standard laboratory based experiments and Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulations. This paper provides validation of such an approach: (i) a universal wear map is generated for the material in question using a jet impingement test (JIT) to generate a wear scar. The local wear rate from this is interpreted using a CFD simulation of the test to generate a map giving local wear as a function of particle impact velocity and angle; (ii) a CFD solution is calculated for a series of different erosion configurations giving the particle impact data at each point on the surface. The wear map from the first stage is then used to give the local wear rate. The power of this method is that once a material-specific map has been generated then wear on any geometry can be calculated through the simulation of flow using CFD.