Development, validation, and application of a three-dimensional, CFD-based erosion prediction procedure

The ability to predict erosion with reasonable accuracy is very important in the analysis of piping systems and equipment life when solid particles are entrained in the fluid. This research effort is aimed at the development, validation, and application of a comprehensive procedure for erosion prediction. The erosion prediction procedure consists of three parts, namely flow modeling, particle transport calculations, and erosion prediction. First, a flow field simulation is obtained using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code. Next, the trajectories for a large number of particles are determined and wall impingement information is stored. For each impingement, the particle impact speed and angle are used to compute erosion rates using empirical relations. Each of the three separate steps have been designed for use with and implemented into a commercially available computational fluid dynamics code. Subsequent to the development of the erosion prediction procedure, the flow modeling and erosion prediction steps were validated through comparisons with available experimental data. Good agreement with the data was observed for each validation test case considered. Finally, demonstration of the procedure using a standard elbow, long-radius elbow, and a plugged tee.