Erosion Modeling in High Concentration Slurry Flow Available to Purchase

Many industrial processes involve high concentration particulate multiphase flow in which the carrier phase is continuous and the solid particles are dispersed in the carrier phase. Although much research has been directed toward modeling of solid particle erosion, very few have presented a generalized approach for erosion modeling under high concentration slurry impact. Experimental and numerical studies have shown that when particles are transported by liquid or dense gas, the particle impact angles are very low. The impact angles in these cases are sometimes less than the smallest angle that can be obtained in a direct impingement erosion test. Moreover, particle-particle interaction is significant when particle loading is high, and the effect should be accounted for in the numerical simulation. In this work, a mechanistic erosion equation that includes an abrasion term for low angle impacts is implemented in CFD simulation of submerged slurry impinging jet with ANSYS Fluent. The Eulerian-Lagrangian method is used to model the carrier fluid flow and particle tracking, respectively, while the particle-particle interaction is resolved statistically through a two-fluid Eulerian-Granular model. In this approach, particle-particle interaction is modelled through solid stresses acting on the particles in a dense flow by an additional acceleration in the particle force balance for the Lagrangian phase. The CFD erosion predictions are compared with experimental data from a previous work in the literature. It is shown that by including the abrasion term, the total mass loss of the specimen agrees better with experimental data, and the obtained erosion pattern is more comparable to the data collected by 3D profilometry. It was found that the combined two-fluid model is capable of capturing the decrease in the erosion ratio (defined as the ratio of material loss to the particle throughput) with increase in particle loading which can be ascribed to a shielding effect caused by particles moving close to the wall.