Abstract
a Abstract. Erosion occurring in equipment dealing with liquid-solid mixtures such as pipeline parts, slurry pumps, liquid-solid stirred reactors and slurry mixers in various industrial applications results in operational failure and economic costs. A slurry erosion tank test rig is designed and was built to investigate the erosion rates of materials and the influencing parameters such as flow velocity and turbulence, flow angle, solid particle concentration, particles size distribution, hardness and target material properties on the material loss and erosion profiles. In the present study, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tool is used to simulate the erosion rate of sample plates in the liquid-solid slurry mixture in a cylindrical tank. The predictions were made in a steady state and also transient manner, applying the flow at the room temperature and using water and sand as liquid and solid phases, respectively. The multiple reference frame method (MRF) is applied to simulate the flow behavior and liquid-solid interactions in the slurry tank test rig. The MRF method is used since it is less demanding than sliding mesh method (SM) and gives satisfactory results. The computational domain is divided into three regions: a rotational or MRF zone containing the mixer, a rotational zone (MRF) containing the erosion plates and a static zone (outer liquid zone). It is observed that changing the MRF zone diameter and height causes a very low impact on the results. The simulated results were obtained for two kinds of hard metals namely stainless steel and ST-50 under some various operating conditions and are found in good agreement with the experimental results.
Highlights
Hydro-erosion occurs in practice in two ways, one is the erosion by a cavitating liquid and the other is the erosion by solid particles entrained in liquid flow known as slurry erosion
Erosion mass loss of stainless steel and steel 50 (ST-50) in water-sand slurry mixture has been measured at different rotational velocities and different sand concentrations
It has been observed that the erosion increases with increase in rotational velocity and the erosion mass loss of ST-50 is reasonably higher than stainless steel; this is expected since the hardness of ST-50 is smaller than the stainless steel hardness
Summary
Hydro-erosion occurs in practice in two ways, one is the erosion by a cavitating liquid and the other is the erosion by solid particles entrained in liquid flow known as slurry erosion. Some of application examples are in processing technology such as stirrers in flotation cells for the wet metal processing or pumps for water treatment, mining and smelting industry, pipes in materials handling with hydraulic contaminant of grained solids (sand, coal, ore, fly ash), turbines and control devices in hydropower engineering especially with high water amount or exposed to flooding [1]. The machinery and equipment dealing with the liquid-solid flows could be damaged by erosion leading to low operational efficiency and short service life with frequent overhaul.
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