A New Approach for Investigation of Erosion-Corrosion Using Local Flow Models

Erosion-corrosion (EC) is a piping degradation mechanism that causes material loss from the inside of piping and thinning of the wall. EC is believed to be a coupled phenomenon including chemical corrosion and mechanical erosion, which is dominated by piping layout, fitting geometry, and local flow structure. A new approach was proposed for investigation of EC phenomenon using local flow models, including the multidimensional, two-fluid model to simulate flow characteristics within piping and EC models to predict two-dimensional distributions of EC locations. Impacts of gravitational and centrifugal forces on two-phase flow behaviors were captured reasonably well by the current three-dimensional, two-fluid models. EC locations predicted by the proposed models showed satisfactory agreement with distributions of wear sites measured in practice. Results showed the models explained the EC phenomenon reasonably well.