Abstract:
In the present work, the investigation of flow characteristics and erosion wear of straight pipeline and bend during the transportation of solid-liquid mixture have been performed. To investigate the flow characteristics of the solid particles inside the straight pipeline, a computer code has been written in C programing language and the pressure drop and concentration distribution of slurry were obtained within the accuracy of ±10% to the experimental results available in the literature. To investigate the erosion wear of the pipeline and bends during slurry transportation, 3-D numerical modeling of the straight pipeline and bend have been performed using Eulerian-Lagrangian approach in the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code ANSYS FLUENT. To estimate the erosion, the model developed by Desale et al. (2011) for erosion due to solid–liquid mixture for low velocity operating condition was selected. A user defined function has been made to incorporate this model in the CFD code FLUENT. The flow field characteristics such as the velocity, impact angle and the frequency of the particle impact on the wall were captured. The distribution of erosion along the flow path has been estimated using the erosion model at different locations. The location of maximum erosion wear is found on the bend extrados at the bend angle of 880. The effect of parameters like velocity, particle size and bend radius ratio on the erosion rate have been studied. It is concluded that the maximum value of erosion rate increases with increase in velocity, particle size and bend radius ratio. The change in particle impact angle and impact frequencies at different locations and their effect on the erosion wear has been documented.
