An integrated model of predicting sand erosion in elbows for multiphase flows

Abstract

Sand erosion is a serious problem to be solved in the oil and gas industry. During the transportation of oil and gas, different multiphase flow patterns may occur due to variations of factors, such as the conveying speed, fluid property and pipe geometry. The present work aims at developing a novel framework to predict sand erosion in elbows for multiphase flows. Firstly, the effects of flow patterns on sand erosion are analyzed. Based on these analyses, the erosion model for each specific flow pattern is established. Combining with the basic penetration ratio in gas flow and erosion coefficients, the erosion models of different flow patterns can be unified as an integrated model. Then, the accuracy of the integrated model is examined by 108 experimental cases. After the experimental validation, an optimal coefficient is proposed to further optimize the integrated model. A comparison between the optimized integrated model and the non-optimized integrated model is performed. The results demonstrate that the optimized integrated model performs well in improving the accuracy. Finally, the integrated model is compared with other existing erosion models. According to the comparative study, the non-optimized integrated model already owns the similar accuracy compared with existing erosion models, while the optimized integrated model performs best in accuracy and efficiency.