Abstract
The oil and gas industry faces significant challenges due to solid particle erosion in various pipe fittings and equipment. Solid particle erosion occurs when particles that are entrained in produced fluids impact the wall of pipeline fitting parts. In order to reduce erosion in various components, different or modified geometries can be introduced to mitigate erosion due to solid particles. Using long-radius elbows, for example, instead of standard elbows has been shown to reduce pipe erosion in elbows and to prevent failure due to solid particle erosion in elbows. Due to the challenges for conducting experiments in multiphase flows involving solid particles, only a few erosion data are available in the literature. This work investigated three different curvature radii (r/D) in a 2-inch (50.8 mm) elbows with r/D of 1.5, 2.25, and 5 in a gas-solid flow condition with 340 μm average particle size. The erosion experiments were performed in a vertical orientation where the orientation of the investigated elbows was vertical-horizontal. The metallic stainless steel (SS316) elbows' wall thicknesses were measured at many points on the outer radius of elbows using a handheld ultrasonic sensor. Finally, the investigated erosion measurements were simulated using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) approach and results are compared with the erosion measurements. The CFD results showed good agreement for predicting the maximum erosion magnitude and pattern as compared to the wall thickness measurements of elbows.
