Erosion and penetration rates of a pipe protruded in a sudden contraction

Numerical investigation of erosion of a pipe protruded in a sudden contraction is presented. The presence of sand in the produced fluid provides many challenges for oil and gas producing companies. Moreover, sand presence causes loss of pipe wall thickness that can lead to pipe erosion, frequent failures and loss of valuable production time. In order to reduce the frequency of such pipe erosions, caps in the form of replaceable pipes are protruded in the sudden contraction regions which are exposed to most of the serious erosion rates. The importance of this problem is mainly due to many related engineering applications, viz. heat exchangers. In the present work, numerical investigation of the erosion of a pipe protruded in a sudden contraction is presented. The geometry is axi-symmetric abrupt contraction pipe with a pipe protrusion embedded in it. The flow is steady, 2D axi-symmetric and is considered turbulent. The Lagrangian approach including flow modeling, particle tracking and erosion calculation was utilized. The continuous flow field was solved by steady-state time averaged conservation equations of mass and momentum along with RNG- model for turbulence. Particles are tracked by using Lagrangian particle tracking. Finally, an erosion model was employed to investigate the erosion phenomena for the given geometry. The influence of the different parameters such as the inlet flow velocity, the particle diameter, the protruded pipe geometry, the pipe wall material and the pipe contraction ratio on the erosion and penetration of pipe protrusion was investigated.

[1]  S. A. Morsi,et al.  An investigation of particle trajectories in two-phase flow systems , 1972, Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

[2]  R. Clift,et al.  Bubbles, Drops, and Particles , 1978 .

[3]  Robert J.K. Wood,et al.  Comparison of predicted and experimental erosion estimates in slurry ducts , 2004 .

[4]  Srdjan Nesic,et al.  Erosion in disturbed liquid/particle pipe flow : effects of flow geometry and particle surface roughness , 1993 .

[5]  Rached Ben-Mansour,et al.  Numerical investigation of erosion threshold velocity in a pipe with sudden contraction , 2005 .

[6]  J. Fontaine,et al.  A lagrangian model for solid particles in turbulent flows , 1993 .

[7]  Wallis S. Hamilton,et al.  Forces on a sphere accelerating in a viscous fluid , 1964, Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

[8]  F. Durst,et al.  Eulerian and Lagrangian predictions of particulate two phase flows , 1984 .

[9]  T. Shih,et al.  A New K-epsilon Eddy Viscosity Model for High Reynolds Number Turbulent Flows: Model Development and Validation , 1994 .

[10]  Gérard Gouesbet,et al.  MODELLING AND PREDICTING TURBULENCE FIELDS AND THE DISPERSION OF DISCRETE PARTICLES TRANSPORTED BY TURBULENT FLOWS , 1986 .

[11]  Efstathios E. Michaelides,et al.  Review-The transient equation of motion for particles , 1997 .

[12]  J. H. Neilson,et al.  Erosion by a stream of solid particles , 1968 .

[13]  N. Rudraiah,et al.  Propagation of internal gravity waves in perfectly conducting fluids with shear flow, rotation and transverse magnetic field , 1972, Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

[14]  Thomas Scanlon,et al.  Prediction of impact erosion in valve geometries , 2004 .

[15]  P R Bullen,et al.  A study of Turbulent Flow in Pipe Contractions , 1996 .

[16]  P. Saffman.  The lift on a small sphere in a slow shear flow , 1965, Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

[17]  Marco Fossa,et al.  Dynamic void fraction measurements in horizontal ducts with sudden area contraction , 1998 .

[18]  S. Patankar.  Numerical Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow , 2018, Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering.

[19]  van der Cwm Cees Geld,et al.  Particle trajectory computations in steady non-uniform liquid flows , 1991 .

[20]  G. Astarita,et al.  Excess Pressure Drop in Laminar Flow through Sudden Contraction. Newtonian Liquids , 1968 .

[21]  Weeratunge Malalasekera,et al.  An introduction to computational fluid dynamics - the finite volume method , 2007 .

[22]  D. Wilcox.  Turbulence modeling for CFD , 1993 .

[23]  R. P. Benedict,et al.  Flow Losses in Abrupt Enlargements and Contractions , 1966 .

[24]  T. Shih,et al.  A new k-ϵ eddy viscosity model for high reynolds number turbulent flows , 1995 .

[25]  Rached Ben-Mansour,et al.  Numerical calculations of erosion in an abrupt pipe contraction of different contraction ratios , 2004 .

[26]  John R. Shadley,et al.  A Procedure to Predict Solid Particle Erosion in Elbows and Tees , 1995 .

[27]  J. Whitelaw,et al.  Round Sudden-Expansion Flows , 1986 .