Modeling sand fines erosion in elbows mounted in series

A comprehensive CFD-based erosion prediction procedure is applied to predict erosion in two elbows mounted in series. First, different CFD models are evaluated with sand fines (28 μm) erosion data from Kumar et al. [1] for two horizontal-horizontal 2 in. short radius elbows mounted in series. The effects of turbulence model and particle rebound model are examined to obtain the most appropriate model combination for running erosion simulation. A systematic grid refinement study is also conducted for the geometry with application to sand fines (28 μm) erosion prediction. In the process, it is found that erosion prediction for sand fines can be significantly affected by grid configuration due to current limitations of CFD codes. Finally, the paper proposes a meshing strategy that is capable of capturing sand fines dispersion and transport which is highly recommended for use to run erosion simulations especially for predicting small particle erosion using current commercial CFD codes.