Abstract
In the oil and gas industry, slug flow is commonly encountered and one of the most erosive flow regimes when sand is entrained. The design of oil and gas production equipment requires a reliable erosion prediction tool. Chen et al.1 proposed an approach for estimating erosion rate in slug flows. It is a combination of mechanistic analysis and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Shirazi et al.2 and McLaury et al.3 presented a method based on some one-dimensional mechanistic models (hence called 1-D method) to predict erosion rate. This method is successful in predicting erosion caused by relatively large sand (>50 microns) but dramatically under-predicts for very small sand (~20 microns). The current authors presented an improved method by introducing two-dimensional mechanistic models (hence called 2-D method)4 . It has been shown that for gas/solid or liquid/solid flows, the 2-D method performs very well in predicting erosion for both large and small sand. This method is being extended for handling gas/liquid/solid flows. This paper explains its application in slug flows. Results from both 1-D and 2-D methods are compared with experimental data. It is shown that overall, the 2-D method performs much better then the 1-D method.
