Computational Analysis of Water-Submerged Jet Erosion

Erosion causes substantial damage in many industrial equipment such as pump components, valves, elbows, and plugged tees. In most cases, erosion is coupled with corrosion, resulting in major financial loss (nearly 3.4% of the global gross domestic product) as evidenced in oil and gas industries. In most cases, the erosion occurs in a submerged water medium. In this paper, erosion characteristics of stainless steel 316 were investigated computationally in a water-submerged jet impingement setup. The erosion profiles and patterns were obtained for various parameters over ranges of inlet velocities (3 to 16 m/s), nozzle diameters (5 to 10 mm), nozzle–target distances (5 to 20 mm), nozzle shapes (circular, elliptical, square, and rectangular), impingement angles (60° to 90°), and particle sizes (50 to 300 µm). The range of Reynolds number studied based on nozzle diameters is 21,000–120,000. The Eulerian–Lagrangian approach was used for flow field prediction and particle tracking considering one-way coupling for the particle–fluid interaction. The Finnie erosion model was implemented in ANSYS-Fluent 19.2 and used for erosion prediction. The computational model was validated against experimental data and the distributions of the erosion depth as well as the locations of the of maximum and minimum erosion points are well matched. As expected, the results indicate an increase in loss of material thickness with increasing jet velocity. Increasing the nozzle diameter caused a reduction in the maximum depth of eroded material due to decreasing the particle impact density. At a fixed fluid inlet velocity, the maximum thickness loss increases as the separation distance between the nozzle outlet and target increases, aspect ratio of nozzle shape decreases, and impingement angle increases. The erosion patterns showed that the region of substantial thickness loss increases as nozzle size/stand-off height increases and as particle size decreases. In addition, increasing the aspect ratio and impingement angle creates skewed erosion patterns.