Abstract
During petroleum production, small sand particles can be entrained with the transported carrier fluid despite of any sand exclusion process and these sand particles can erode inner walls of pipelines. Therefore, the ability to accurately predict erosion rate caused by particles in oil and water is important to pipeline safety. There are erosion equations available in the literature to predict this phenomenon. However, most of the widely used erosion equations are derived by analyzing gas-solid erosion process, which were later validated and shown to be less accurate in predicting slurry erosion. Modified slurry erosion equations are then proposed to improve the prediction accuracy, while overpredictions occur when particle sizes vary. In this study, the available mechanistic and empirical equations are evaluated by experimental and numerical study. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is used to simulate the fluid flow and track particles to obtain impact information. Erosion equations then connect the particles’ impact information with erosion rate. The slurry erosion experiments are conducted using quartz silica particles with similar shapes and different sizes ranging from 25 micrometers to 600 micrometers in oil and water as carrier fluids. Finally, the erosion models are evaluated by comparing predicted erosion profile with experimental data.
