Abstract:
Slurry erosion is responsible for major failures in oil and gas transmission pipelines.
During petroleum production, sand particles can be entrained with the transported carrier
fluid despite any sand exclusion process and erode the inner walls of the pipelines. This
erosion process may even cause pipe leakage and oil spill. Therefore, investigating the
regularities of erosion damage changing with particle size and predicting erosion
behavior for different particle sizes are important to pipeline safety. In this study, the
slurry erosion behavior of AISI 1018 carbon steel is investigated to determine the effect
of three different parameters on the erosion rate of the targeted material. These parameters
are flow velocity, impingement angle, and erodent particle size. We investigated the
erosion of steel caused by wet sand particles. Carbon steel will be used as it is the most
deployed material in the industry. There are two options either to use an elbow shape
plate or a flat plate. We opted for a flat plate of carbon steel as all erosion models had
been developed for flat plates. There are two ways to study the erosion of materials. The
first is the flow loop and the second is the direct impact test. We applied a direct impact
test as in this test we can control the flow and impact conditions. Fine sand was of concern
for us in terms of erosion as its size is almost 62.5microns which is less than the size of
sieve mesh whose size is 75 microns. The very first step of the whole procedure was
polishing. Flat plates can be polished easily as compared to elbow shape plates. The
confocal microscope is not available, so we used the digital microscope. The direct mass
loss was measured to quantify the erosion rate of the test specimens. Qualitative
techniques such as multilayer paint modeling and microscopic surface imaging are also
used to scrutinize the flow accelerated erosion mechanism
