Attenuation of wall-thinning rate in deep erosion by liquid droplet impingement

This paper describes an experimental study on the wall-thinning rate in deep erosion by liquid droplet impingement (LDI) in a pipeline for application to nuclear/fossil power plant. The experiment is carried out in a spray jet apparatus, which allows the evaluation of local wall-thinning rate by the LDI erosion. The surface contour of erosion and the wall-thinning rate are measured and the observation by scanning electron microscope (SEM) is carried out in this experiment. The experimental result indicates that the wall-thinning rate is highly attenuated and the macro structure on the erosion surface grows with an increase in the erosion depth, which is due to the influence of the liquid film over the erosion surface. The erosion model for predicting the wall-thinning rate in deep erosion is proposed by introducing the attenuation factor with a function of erosion depth. The introduction of attenuation factor with liquid-film effect shows a better correlation with the experimental data, and the accuracy of correlation is improved by a factor of 2.