Experimental Study on Liquid Droplet Impingement Erosion by Uniformly Sprayed Droplets

In the present paper, the characteristics of liquid droplet impingement erosion are studied experimentally to propose a new model for predicting the pipe-wall thinning. The spray droplets used in this study is an order of tens of micrometers in diameter. In order to obtain an accurate estimation of erosion rate, an experiment is carried out under the condition of the circular specimen in uniformly sprayed droplets. The experiments on erosion rate indicate that the wall thinning increases linearly with respect to the local droplet volume, which is measured by the sampling probe. It is found that the erosion rate is proportional to the power of 4.0 with respect to the local flow rate of the droplets. This power number is found to be equivalent to 7.2 for the droplet velocity. The present experiment also showed the influence of the liquid film on the erosion, which reduces the erosion rate of the material.