A study of flow accelerated corrosion at elbow of carbon steel pipeline by array electrode and computational fluid dynamics simulation

A novel method by combining array electrode technique with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation was proposed to determine the correlation between the corrosion behavior at the elbow of pipeline and the hydrodynamics of fluid flow. It is demonstrated that the distribution of the measured corrosion rates is in good accordance with the distributions of flow velocity and shear stress at the elbow. The corrosion rates at the inner wall of elbow are higher than those at the outer wall of elbow. The maximum corrosion rate appears at innermost side while the minimum corrosion rate at outermost side of the elbow.