Solid Particle Erosion Downstream of an Orifice

The paper deals with solid particle erosion downstream of a sharp-edged orifice commonly found in many chemical processing industries. The orifice is installed in a pipe that is long enough to ensure fully developed turbulent flow in both upstream and downstream directions. Both the k-epsilon model and the Lagrangian particle-tracking technique were used for predicting solid particle trajectories. GAMBIT 2.2 was used to construct the computational grid and the commercial FLUENT 12.1 code was used to perform the calculations. The available erosion correlations were used for determination of erosion characteristics considering carbon steel and aluminum pipes. The investigation was carried out for a flow restricting orifice of fixed geometry and pipe flow velocities in the range 1-4 m/s using solid particle of diameters 50-500 mu m. The results indicated two critical erosion regions downstream of the orifice: the first is in the immediate neighborhood of the orifice plate and the second is in the flow reattachment zone. The results showed also a strong dependence of erosion on both particle size and flow velocity.