Kabir, Muhammad Ehsanul (2005) Numerical investigation of erosion of a pipe protruded in a sudden contraction. Masters thesis, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals.
The aim of this research is to numerically investigate the erosion phenomenon of a pipe protruded in sudden contraction geometry. The importance of this problem is mainly due to erosion of various gas and liquid flow passage devices such as heat exchangers, pipes, pumps, turbines and compressors, where erosion imposes serious problems like frequent failures and loss of expensive production time. In the present work, the geometry is an axi-symmetric abrupt pipe contraction with a pipe protrusion embedded in it. The flow is steady, 2-D axi-symmetric and is considered turbulent. The continuous flow field is obtained by solving Steady-state time averaged conservation equations of mass and momentum along with RNG- model for turbulence. Particles are tracked by using Lagrangian particle tracking. Finally, an erosion model is employed to investigate the erosion phenomena. In this study, different parameters are varied to observe their influence on erosion rate. A range of values is selected for every parameter. Inlet flow velocity is varied from 0.5 m/s to 10 m/s. Particle diameter is varied from 10μm to 400μm. Both the protruded pipe depth and thickness are varied for the ranges of 1mm to 5mm. Contraction ratios from 0.25 to 0.590 are considered. Carbon steel and aluminum are selected as pipe material. Obtained results show strong influence of each parameter on the erosion rates of the protruded pipe. The results show erosion rate increment with the increasing inlet flow velocity and particle diameter. A declining trend in erosion rate is observed for the increasing protruded pipe depth and thickness values. A similar declining trend is also observed with the increasing contraction ratio. Particle trajectories are observed for all the cases to get an insight into these findings. Threshold values for the inlet flow velocity and the protruded pipe depth are obtained. In order to determine the most eroded and the most penetrated geometric configuration of the protruded pipe, additional analysis is performed with different combinations of depth and thickness.
|Item Type:||Thesis (Masters)|
|Divisions:||College Of Engineering Sciences > Mechanical Engineering Dept|
|Creators:||Kabir, Muhammad Ehsanul|
|Committee Advisor:||Habib, M. A.|
|Committee Members:||Mokheimer, Esmail M. A. and Badr, Hassan M. and Said, Syed A. M. and Ben-Mansour, Rached|
|Deposited By:||KFUPM ePrints Admin|
|Deposited On:||22 Jun 2008 17:07|
|Last Modified:||30 Apr 2011 15:36|
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