Investigation of Erosion Wear in Slurry Pipe Bend Using CFD

Abstract

Erosion wear is the serious/major problem in industrial, power plants utilities like pipe-line, bends, tees, impellers and pump due to impingement of solid particulates at high velocity entraining through fluid. Hence erosion wear shorten the life of the concerned components and an extra expenditure for the maintenance and repair. In thermal power plants large amount of fly ash and bottom ash is produced from the pulverized coal –fired in boiler. The fly ash is collected in ESP while the bottom ash transported to ash-pond in the slurry form through pipe-line system leads to erosion wear in the pipe line. Many authors and researchers have reported that erosion rate is affected by various parameters like solid concentration, velocity, impact angle, particle size, target material etc. In the present study, the erosion wear in the pipe-bend for the flow of solid-liquid is evaluated in the CFD code FLUENT. Also the effects of velocity, solid concentration and particles size have been studied numerically by varying these parameters from ranges of 0.5m/s to 2.5 m/s, 2.5% to 10% and 162(micron) & 300(micron) respectively. The k-ɛ turbulence model for fluid flow and discrete phase to track the solid particles in the flow field are used in simulation. The magnitude and location of the erosion rate are influenced by prescribed conditions. The results show a good agreement with the previous work of many researchers and authors.