Erosion and penetration rates of a pipe protruded in a sudden contraction

Abstract

Numerical investigation of erosion of a pipe protruded in a sudden contraction is presented. The presence of sand in the produced fluid provides many challenges for oil and gas producing companies. Moreover, sand presence causes loss of pipe wall thickness that can lead to pipe erosion, frequent failures and loss of valuable production time. In order to reduce the frequency of such pipe erosions, caps in the form of replaceable pipes are protruded in the sudden contraction regions which are exposed to most of the serious erosion rates. The importance of this problem is mainly due to many related engineering applications, viz. heat exchangers. In the present work, numerical investigation of the erosion of a pipe protruded in a sudden contraction is presented. The geometry is axi-symmetric abrupt contraction pipe with a pipe protrusion embedded in it. The flow is steady, 2D axi-symmetric and is considered turbulent. The Lagrangian approach including flow modeling, particle tracking and erosion calculation was utilized. The continuous flow field was solved by steady-state time averaged conservation equations of mass and momentum along with RNG- model for turbulence. Particles are tracked by using Lagrangian particle tracking. Finally, an erosion model was employed to investigate the erosion phenomena for the given geometry. The influence of the different parameters such as the inlet flow velocity, the particle diameter, the protruded pipe geometry, the pipe wall material and the pipe contraction ratio on the erosion and penetration of pipe protrusion was investigated.