Numerical simulation study on the influence of incident position on erosion characteristics of gas-particle two-phase flow in 90° elbow

Abstract

In gas gathering pipeline system, 90° elbow suffers constant and severe collision of gas-carrying particles, which causes serious erosion on the inner wall. In this study, models of standard elbows (carbon steel with 210 GPa in elasticity modulus and 8300 kg/m3 in density) whose diameter varies from 65 to 200 mm with curvature ratio 1.5 are established to predict erosion rate causes by silica sand (100 μm in diameter, 1550 kg/m3 in bulk density) under gas gathering operating conditions (5.0 MPa, 10 m/s). Unlike most of the previous studies which only focus on erosion result on the wall, in this article, author extracts sample particles as research objects and studies the motion of every single particle. It has been found that there are three typical types of particle motion patterns in the elbow, and a part of sand particles released from lower area of incident plane will not even cause erosion.