Umerical Simulation Techniques Of Solid Particle Erosion And Their Examination In Submarine Pipelines

The safety and reliability of pipelines must be ensured to meet the demand offurther development in deepwater oil and gas drilling technology. Solid particleerosion in submarine pipelines is a severe problem involved in hydrocarbontransportation as well as an important topic of the flow assurance. Much research hasbeen carried out on solid particle erosion mechanism at home and abroad until now,the development of CFD-based model greatly accelerated the process of theexploration on solid particle erosion. This model gives sufficient consideration to thecomplex flow field and the particle trajectory inside the pipelines，hence it has showndistinct advantages compared to the experience models and semi-empirical models.The procedure consists of three main sections: flow modeling, particle trackingand penetration calculation. According to the steps above, the present work firstlyverifies the validity of the CFD-based erosion model, then a set of feasible erosionprediction method is built to summarize the general process of the solid particleerosion within pipelines. Good agreement between experimental data and thesimulation results is demonstrated by using several erosion equations. The reliablenumerical technology was established for the solid particle erosion in pipelines toprovide important technical guidance to engineering applications.During the calculation，the shear stress transport model is employed to analyzethe flow field and a Lagrangian method combined with particle stochastic reboundmodel is adopted to track the particle trajectories. Based on the knowledge of the flowfield and the particle motions, four solid particle erosion models are introduced inANSYS CFX to calculate the penetration rates and the model performances arediscussed deeply. Compared with the experimental data available in literatures, all theerosion models show good prediction accuracy for elbow geometries and the resultsobtained from Tabakoff erosion model are more approached to the experiment values.Conversely, an obvious disagreement between numerical results and experimentaldata can be observed due to the mechanism of particle motions for plugged tees.