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Erosion analysis using ANSYS CFX and ANSYS FLUENT
Being able to estimate the erosive wear on piping, valves, probes etc. is of great importance in many industries. Erosion often limits the expected life time of piping details, and is vital in risk management studies.
Semi-empirical models and correlations of erosive wear are often limited to predicting peak values of wear and usually exist only for simple standard geometries. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is a very valuable tool to overcome these shortcomings. Local models can be implemented to give local predictions of erosive wear. This provides the user with detailed information on the exact location and magnitude of the erosive wear.
Erosion analyses can be performed for internal and external flows. Examples of internal flows include flows in pipes, valves, flow meters, etc., and external flows include erosion on protruding details, e.g. measuring probes, screw nuts, flow around pipes, etc.
ANSYS provides two different “ready-to-use” CFD software packages containing a preprocessor, solver, and postprocessor; ANSYS CFX and ANSYS FLUENT. Both software are available with the ANSYS CFD license, and can be expanded with High-performance computing (HPC) capabilities for parallel simulations. Standard models for erosive wear are built-in but any model can be added via user-provided functions (C++ or Fortran).
EDR has been working with companies from several industrial branches to conduct erosion analyses. We have the engineering competence and computational strength to provide trustworthy results that can help you to make the right decisions. We can offer a variety of levels of cooperation, ranging from a complete project responsibility to providing software support.
Figure 1: Erosive wear [mm/year] on a measure probe in a water flow containing sand particles.
Figure 2: Internal flow of natural gas containing sand particles. Selected particle trajectories are colored in grey and the erosive wear hotspots on the piping is colored out in red.