Design and Fabrication of Experimental Setup To Study The Erosion of Steel By Wet Sand Particle Impact

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