Parametric Investigation on the Effect Factors for Liquid Droplet Impingement Erosion

Liquid droplet impingement (LDI) erosion could be regarded to be one of the major causes of unexpected troubles occasionally occurred in the inner bent pipe surface. Evaluating the LDI erosion is an important topic of the thermal hydraulics and structural integrity in aging and life extension for nuclear power plants safety. In order to investigate the effect of various parameters, such as droplet diameter, droplet velocity and injected droplet number, on the erosion rate induced by LDI, droplet impingement under different conditions are conducted numerically by a two-phase computational approach. Considering the carrier turbulence kinetic energy attenuation due to the involved droplets, numerical simulations have been performed by using two-way vapor-droplet coupled system. This computational fluid model is built up by incompressible Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stoke equations using standard k-ε model and the SIMPLE algorithm, and the numerical droplet model adopts the Lagrangian approach, a general LDI erosion prediction procedure for bent pipe geometry has been performed to supplement an available CFD code. A correlation for the erosion rate in terms of droplet velocity, diameter and volume fraction is purposed for the engineers’ maintenance reference. Based on our computational results, comparison with an available accident data was made to prove that our methodology could be an appropriate way to simulate and predict the bent pipe wall thinning phenomena.