A geometry independent integrated method to predict erosion wear rates in a slurry environment

Material wear due to erosion-corrosion in slurry transport equipment is prevalent in process industries such as the oilsands industry. Damage to equipment can cost a typical oilsands industry nearly £200 million annually, along with an associated health and safety risk to man and environment [6]. New materials are continuously developed in order to endure wear under adverse erosion-corrosion conditions better and laboratory testing offers a good option to test new materials prior to commission. Traditionally the performance of a set of new materials are assessed based on their overall wear behavior in a laboratory test and is ranked accordingly, with the best performing material generally used for application. However, due to differences in prevailing conditions on the material surface and geometrical variations between actual and test geometry, accurately correlating data from a laboratory test to field scenario can be highly complex. Also the ranking system is not capable of predicting wear profiles for specific conditions and hence a new wear prediction method was developed and is presented in this thesis. This method has been developed, using a combination of standard laboratory based experiments and Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulations. As a starting point only wear due to erosion is considered and this thesis provides validation of such an approach. The method involves two stages in which (i) a universal wear map is generated for the material and abrasive combination in question using a standard laboratory test Uet impingement test) to generate a wear scar on a simple geometry. The local wear rate from this is interpreted using a CFD simulation of the test to generate a map giving local wear as a function of particle impact velocity and angle; (ii) a CFD solution is calculated for a series of different erosion configurations giving the particle impact data at each point on the surface. The wear map from the first stage is then used to give the local wear rate. The power of this method is that once a material-specific map has been generated then wear on any geometry can be calculated through the simulation of flow using CFD. As validation of this, wear on a typical plant geometry (1.50 90 0 elbow bend) is undertaken and the general applicability of this method is demonstrated.