Effect of flow field on particle erosion in eroded square elbows

Abstract

Erosion often occurs on the inner wall of gathering pipelines. Even if the particle size is small, the cumulative erosion may also cause serious erosion on pipelines and even leads to leakages. In order to learn erosion on elbows of pipelines in natural gas stations, mechanisms analysis and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method were used to investigate erosion on square elbows based on a case of elbows erosion in a gas gathering station. The results show that there are erosion sensitive areas on the eroded surface of elbows which are more likely to be eroded, erosion prediction of elbows could be obtained through CFD method. It is concluded that researches on erosion are important in oil and gas gathering industry and could be a good guiding for life prediction, inspection and operational safety protection of gathering pipelines.