Solid particle erosion prediction models have been developed previously based on limited data and without consideration of uncertainties involved in measurements. In this study, a new correlation is developed to estimate the maximum erosion rate caused by solid particles in standard elbow geometries. The novel development process of this correlation includes uncertainty estimation of erosion measurements. In order to estimate uncertainties in an erosion database, it is imperative to have a model that could be used to calculate accurate erosion values to have reliable references. For this purpose, a database of repeated erosion measurements for gas-sand flows at low-pressure collected by previous researchers is used that includes standard elbow geometries with 0.0762 m and 0.1016 m internal pipe diameter, sand particles with mean diameters of 75 and 300 μm. Then, the erosion values in this database are adjusted to agree with physical behaviors expected in erosion process. Finally, based on the adjusted erosion values, a new correlation is developed that accounts for important paramters such as pipe and particle diameters, and gas velocity. The results and comparison of this new model with other correlations/models in the literature show that this correlation performs very well in predicting solid-particle erosion values for elbow geometry with a RMSE value of 7.96E-02 mm/kg. The effect of superficial liquid velocity is also investigated and modeled based on a database of gas-liquid-sand erosion and the correlation is updated for predicting erosion in two-phase flow conditions. Furthermore, CFD results for higher pressure fluids and larger pipe diameters of 0.1524 m and 0.2032 m and mean particle sizes of 25, 75, 150 and 300 μm, are used to further develop and validate the correlation for larger pipe size and high-pressure fluids flows. In summary, three correlations have been developed in this research; one for low-pressure flows with application in uncertainty estimation, one for predicting erosion in two-phase flow conditions, and one for cases with larger pipe diameters or high-pressure fluids.
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