Numerical Simulation of Sand Erosion in a Square-Section 90-Degree Bend

Abstract

Sand erosion is a phenomenon whereby solid particles impinging on a wall cause serious mechanical damage to the wall surface. The performance and lifetime of various machines, such as airplanes, ships, gas turbines, and pumps, are severely degraded by sand erosion. This phenomenon is a typical gas-particle two-phase turbulent flow and can be considered as a multi-physics problem in which the flow field, particle trajectory, and wall deformation interact. However, neither the change of the flow field nor the related particle trajectory during the erosion process has been taken into account in conventional simulations. This treatment is physically unrealistic. Hence, we have developed a numerical procedure by which to investigate the sand erosion phenomenon, including the temporal change of the flow field and the wall shape. In the present study, we simulate sand erosion of a 90-degree bend with a square cross-section. Bend erosion is the typical subject of sand erosion experiments and is useful for the verification of numerical simulations. The numerical results are compared with experimental data and it is confirmed that the developed code can capture the sand erosion phenomenon reasonably.

Keywords

• erosion
• gas-solid two-phase flow
• three-dimensional flow
• turbulent flow
• pipe flow