Erosion regularities of gas pipelines based on the gas-solid two-way coupling method

Wenshan Peng, Xuewen Cao, Kun Xu, Jinjuan Li, and Yin Fan

Citation: AIP Conference Proceedings 1794, 020033 (2017); doi: 10.1063/1.4971915

View online: https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4971915
View Table of Contents: http://aip.scitation.org/toc/apc/1794/1
Published by the American Institute of Physics

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 Erosion Regularities of Gas Pipelines Based On the Gas-
Solid Two-Way Coupling Method
Wenshan Peng a), Xuewen Cao b), Kun Xu c), Jinjuan Li d) and Yin Fan e)

College of Pipeline and Civil Engineering in China University of Petroleum, Qingdao 266580, China.
a)
pengwenshan1386@126.com
b)
Corresponding author: caoxw@upc.edu.cn
c)
17854267518@163.com
d)
lijj931229@163.com
e)
15928645587@163.com

Abstract. In order to study the erosion regularities of pipelines with gas-solid flow and to predict the location where the
maximum erosion occurs, the Eulerian-Lagrangian method was employed to calculate the gas-solid flow inner the
pipeline. The gas phase flow field was calculated under the Eulerian coordinate system and the trajectory of particles
were calculated under the Lagrangian coordinate system. The DNV erosion model and Forder et al. particle-wall collision
model were used to calculate the erosion rate of the pipe wall. The two-way coupling method was taken into
consideration in the process of numerical calculation. Multiple models are combined to study the erosion rate and the
maximum erosion location of elbows under the conditions of five parameters which exert the most serious effect on
erosion, including pipe diameter, particle diameter, inlet velocity, etc. The results show that: (1) the maximum erosion
location of the pipe bend is sensitive with the change of the bend orientation, pipe diameter and inlet velocity; (2) the
critical diameter of solid particle is proposed and the erosion regularities differ significantly before and after the critical
diameter.

INTRODUCTION
In the oil and gas industry, the solid particles entrained in gas pipeline continuously impact the pipe, bends,
valves and other pipeline components for a long time and ultimately results in the erosion and damage of the
pipeline system [1]. As a common component used for transporting oil and gas, pipe bend will be subjected to the
serious sand erosion from the impacts of solid particles. Thus, it’s essential to study the relationship between the
erosion regularities of pipeline under different influential parameters in order to predict the most vulnerable
locations in the pipeline where severe erosion is likely to occur.
The erosion of gas-solid two-phase flow is a complex process. Meng and Ludema [2] summarized the previous
literatures about the particle erosion and found that there were 33 important parameters that influence erosion. Most
of the currently available studies on pipe erosion for gas-solid flow concentrate on the erosion resulting from the
changes of limited parameters using a specific erosion model [3,4], rather than systematically analyzing the
correlation between the main parameters affecting the erosion rate. Some experimental studies [5, 6] illustrated that
the most severe erosion location in the bend occurred on the outermost side of the elbow. The failure probability of
bend is much larger than the straight pipe and the erosion rate of bend can be up to 50 times of the straight pipe.
However, studies on the prediction of the maximum erosion angle of the elbow are relatively few. Most of the
investigators [3, 7] adopted one-way coupling method to simulate the pipe erosion, which ignored the effect of solid
particles on the gas phase. This method is only acceptable when the solid particles have a much smaller mass
fraction in two-phase flow. This will cause big error for calculating the erosion of pipe bend for non-dilute particle
flow. To detailed study the erosion distribution and maximum erosion location of the pipe bend, this paper takes the
gas-solid interaction into consideration by using the two-way coupling method. The effects of pipe geometry,

2016 International Conference on Materials Science, Resource and Environmental Engineering

AIP Conf. Proc. 1794, 020033-1–020033-8; doi: 10.1063/1.4971915
Published by AIP Publishing. 978-0-7354-1460-0/$30.00

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particle properties and fluid properties on erosion are discussed using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method.
The results can provide a reference for the prediction of pipe erosion under various influencing parameters.

COMPUTATIONAL MODEL
The Eulerian-Lagrangian approach is employed to solve the gas-solid flow in pipe bends. The gas phase is
computed by solving Navier-Stokes equation under Eulerian coordinate system and the particle trajectory is
computed by using the newton’s second law under Lagrangian coordinate system. The continuous phase will affect
the motion of particle, and meanwhile the movement of particle will affect the continuous fluid flow field. Thus the
paper takes the two-way coupling into account. The standard k-ε turbulence model is employed to solve the gas
phase flow.

Governing Equation of the Dispersed Phase

The particle trajectory is computed by solving particle motion equation under Lagrangian coordinate system. In
the gas-solid two-phase flow, the acting forces on solid particle are drag force, gravity, added mass force and
pressure gradient force. The force equation of solid particle is given by:

­ dV p g(U p  U )
° dt FD (u  u p )   Fother
°
Up
° 18P CD Re s
° FD
° U p d p2 24
® (1)
° Re Ud p | up  u |
° s
P
°
°C a a
a1  2  32
° D Re s Re s
¯

Where u is the gas velocity; u p is the particle velocity; U p is the particle density; Re s is the relative Reynolds
number; CD is the drag force coefficient; g is the gravity acceleration; Fother is other forces on particle;
a1 , a 2 and a 3 are constants for spherical particle within a certain range of Reynolds number, specific values of them
are given in reference [8].
In the gas-solid flow field, the density difference between dispersed phase and continuous phase is very large.
The pressure does not change significantly over a distance of one particle diameter. Hence, the virtual mass force
and the pressure gradient force which are determined by the density difference and the pressure gradient of flow
field on are neglected.

Two-Way Coupling
The gas phase has a great influence on the movement of solid particles through the drag force and turbulence
effect, and meanwhile the solid particle has an effect on reducing the momentum and turbulent energy of the gas
phase. The effect of solid particles on continuous phase is achieved by adding source terms into the momentum
equation and turbulent flow equation, the form of these source terms are given in references [9]and [10].The
momentum exchange between continuous phase and dispersed phase is obtained by calculating momentum change
of a solid particle passing each control volume. Two-way turbulence coupling enables the effect of change in
turbulent quantities due to particle damping and turbulence eddies. The effect is added into turbulent flow equation
in source term, the form of these source terms are given in references [11] and [12].

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 Erosion Model
Det Norske Veritas (DNV) [13] proposed an erosion model for various target materials based on a large number
of experimental data. The model is given by:

ER CF (T )VPn (2)

8
F (T ) ¦ (1)
i 1
i 1
AiTi (3)

Where ER is the erosion rate of the target, it is defined as the wall mass loss per unit area and per unit time
(kg·m-2·s-1). In this study, ER is finally given as the penetration rate, which is evaluated by dividing the erosion rate
by the density of pipe wall material; C = 2.0 u 109 and n=2.6 are empirical constants; V p is the particle impact
speed in m/s; θ is the impact angle in radians; F (T ) is the function of impact angle derived by fittings of
experimental data.
TABLE 1. Values of Ai
A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 A6 A7 A8
9.370 42.295 110.864 175.804 170.137 98.398 31.211 4.170

Particle-wall Rebound Model

The solid particles will lose some energy after impacting the pipe wall. The energy loss is mainly performed in
the change of particle velocity before and after collision. The loss of energy is characterized by the recovery
coefficients which represent the ratio of the velocity component before and after collision. The paper employs the
stochastic recovery coefficient proposed by Forder et al. [14] to calculate the velocity after impacting the wall. The
model is given as:

°H N 0.988  0.78T  0.19T  0.024T  0.027T

­ 2 3 4

® (4)
°̄H T 1  0.78T  0.84T  0.21T  0.028T  0.022T
2 3 4 5

Where T and N represent the tangential and normal direction, respectively.

NUMERICAL MODELING

Case Description
The pipe bend model includes inlet section L1, elbow section and outlet section L2. The initial diameter of the
pipe bend is 40mm, and the curvature ratio is 1.5.The density of the pipe wall is 7800 kg/m3. To obtain a fully
developed pipe flow, the lengths of both upstream and downstream pipe are set as 18D. The simulations are
executed under the condition of standard atmospheric pressure. Air is the continuous phase fluid with the initial inlet
velocity of 20m/s. The air flows in the pipe bend from the inlet of horizontal straight pipe and flows out from the
vertical straight pipe. The initial bend orientation is horizontal-vertical (H-V) upward. The density of the sand
particle is 2650kg/m3 and the initial diameter of the particle is 200μm. The initial mass flow rate of the sand
particles is 0.2kg/s. The direction of gravity is the negative direction of the Y axis, as shown in Fig.1.

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 FIGURE 1. Geometry of pipe bend and the grid

Computational Mesh
Meshing consists of two parts: surface meshing and volume meshing. Considering the influence of the viscous
sublayer near the pipe wall, the grid of the near-wall layer is encrypted appropriately. The mesh of boundary layer is
subdivided for improving computing accuracy. Unstructured meshing is adopted in the rest. The mesh division of
the pipe bend cross-section is shown in Fig. 1. The total number of grids in the three-dimension model is about
960000.

Boundary Condition
The standard k-ε turbulence model is employed to calculate the gas phase and the standard wall function method
is employed to simulate the near-wall area. The boundary conditions of the inlet and outlet are velocity inlet and
outflow respectively. The paper sets the wall boundary as stationary wall and no-slip wall. The wall roughness
constant is set as 0.5.In the dispersed phase model, the inlet and outlet boundary is set as escape condition and the
pipe wall is set as reflect condition. The particles are injected from the inlet. The initial velocity of particles is the
same with the inlet velocity of the gas.

Numerical Algorithm
The standard discretization schemes are employed for the pressure terms and the second order upwind
discretization schemes are employed for the momentum and turbulent terms. The convergent criteria for all
calculations are set as that the residual in the control volume for each equation is smaller than 10-5. The solid
trajectories are calculated by using the discrete random walk (DRW) model. The pressure and velocity field is
solved by the SIMPLE algorithm to improve convergence. The dispersed phase and the continuous phase are
computed with two-way coupling. After five steps of continuous phase calculation, calculate particle trajectories,
and then add the updated particles momentum and turbulence to the next step of continuous phase calculation.

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 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Effect of Velocity on Erosion

(a)The maximum erosion rate in pipe bend (b)Erosion rate in different angle of the elbow
FIGURE 2. Erosion rate for the pipe bends under different velocity

Erosion rate for the pipe bend with different velocity is illustrated in Fig.2. In Fig.2a, the maximum erosion rate
increases as the velocity increases and shows an exponential relationship. Erosion rate for the pipe bends at different
angle is demonstrated in Fig.2b. When the velocity is relatively small, the maximum erosion location often takes
place in a small angle around 20°. As the velocity increases, the maximum erosion location occurs at an angle
between 45°-50°.This is mainly attributed to the fact that particle stays longer in the straight section when the
velocity is small. The gravity drives the particles hit the pipe wall at small angles in the elbow.

Effect of Particle Diameter on Erosion

(a)The maximum erosion rate of pipe bend (b)Erosion rate at different angle of the elbow
FIGURE 3. Erosion rate for the pipe bends under different particle diameter

Erosion rate for the pipe bends with different particle diameter is illustrated in Fig.3. Fig.3a shows that as the
particle diameter increases, the erosion rate increases, and when the particle diameter exceeds 150μm, the erosion
rate tends to keep steady as particle diameter increases. This is may be because the larger particles transfer more
momentum to the gas phase. Thus, the coupling effect between the solid particles and gas phase make the erosion
rate increase slowly. Although the increase tendency of the erosion caused by the particles from the diameter of
100μm to150μm is less remarkable than those from 50μm to 100μm, it is still more remarkable than the particles
which diameter is larger than 150μm. Thus, the critical diameter of the particle erosion is 150μm.
In Fig.3b, the maximum erosion location of the pipe bends under different particle diameter occurs at the angle
about 45°. This angle will change slightly with the particle diameter increasing. This is because the drag force makes

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the impact angle of smaller particles increases slightly. Particle diameter does not play an important role in changing
the maximum erosion angle.

Effect of Particle Mass Flow Rate on Erosion

(a)The maximum erosion rate of pipe bend (b)Erosion rate at different angle of the elbow
FIGURE 4. Erosion rate for the pipe bends under different particle mass flow rate

Erosion rate of the pipe bends under different particle mass flow rate is illustrated in Fig.4. In Fig.4a, the erosion
rate increases linearly as the particle mass flow rate increases. Mainly because that as the particle mass flow rate
increase, the collision number between particle and inner wall increases, and then result in higher erosion rate. The
maximum erosion location occurs at the angle between 45° and 50°, as shown in Fig.4b. This angle keeps the same
no matter how the particle mass flow rate changes.

Effect of Pipe Diameter on Erosion

(a)The maximum erosion rate of pipe bend (b)Erosion rate at different angle of the elbow
FIGURE 5. Erosion rate for the pipe bend under different pipe diameter

Erosion rate for the pipe bend with different pipe diameter is illustrated in Fig.5. Fig.5a shows that as pipe
diameter increases, the erosion rate decreases quickly. As the pipe diameter increases to 400mm, the erosion rate
arrives at a lower level. The erosion rate of the pipe bend with the diameter of 40mm is two orders of magnitude
higher than that with the diameter of 400mm. This presents the remarkable influence of diameter. When the pipe
diameter exceeds 400mm, the erosion rate will decrease slightly. This is mainly due to the fact that the pipe with
large diameter has a relatively larger impact surface. Pipe with small diameter suffers from more particle collisions
per unit area than those with large diameter, and ultimately are eroded more severely.
As is shown in Fig.5b, there are two peaks in maximum erosion rate of the outermost of the elbow. The first one
occurs at the angle between 15°and 20°, and the second occurs at the angle between 45° and 50°.The peak position
changes as the pipe diameter increases. When the pipe diameter is rather small, such as 40mm or 100mm, the
maximum erosion location occurs at the angle between 45° and 50°. When the pipe diameter is rather large, the
maximum erosion location occurs at the angle between 15° and 20°. This is mainly because as the pipe diameter

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increases, the solid particles have more time to adapt to the changes around, and the gravity makes solid particles
easier to move at the bottom of the pipe, thus the maximum erosion angle of pipe bends with larger diameter are
smaller.

Effect of Bend Orientation on Erosion

(a)The maximum erosion rate of pipe bend (b)Erosion rate at different angle of the elbow
FIGURE 6. Erosion rate for the pipe bends under different bend orientation

Erosion rate for the pipe bend with different bend orientation is illustrated in Fig.6.In Fig.6a, the maximum
erosion rate occurs in the direction of H-V upward pipe bend. In this direction, the gravity has a significant influence
on the particle movement, the particles tend to impact the elbow at a lower location than the other orientations, and
as a result, the impact area that the solid particles collide with pipe wall is the smallest among these four directions.
The number of particles impacting the pipe wall in unit area is the largest, thus it leads to a larger erosion rate. In
Fig.6b, the erosion tendency in the direction of V-H at different angles is similar. However, the erosion tendency for
the pipe bend in the H-V direction is quite different from each other. The flow direction of particles change due to
the gravity, particles deviate from the streamline and moves downward, thus the impact angle increases. Hence, for
the pipe bend in H-V downward direction, the maximum erosion angle increases.

CONCLUSION
The particle mass flow rate, particle velocity and the particle diameter can effectively influence the erosion rate
of the pipe bend. Increasing the pipe diameter can reduce erosion and extend the service life of the pipe bend.
The maximum erosion location is sensitive with the change of the bend orientation, pipe diameter and inlet
velocity. The maximum erosion location occurs at a relatively small angle if the pipe diameter and the particle
velocity are small, and this phenomenon is different from that in the pipe with large pipe diameter or under high
velocity.
The critical particle diameter for the erosion progress is150μm, the erosion regularity is obviously different when
the particle diameter is larger or smaller than this value. The erosion rate tends to be stable when the particle
diameter is larger than 150μm.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of the State Key Research and Development
Program of China (No.2016YFC0802301) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of
China (No.15CX06070A).

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