Optimized Design of Pipe Elbows for Erosion Wear

Abstract

Multiphase flows are widely used to transport solid–liquid mixtures in oil and gas fields. The pipeline structures used can suffer damage from the high-pressure sand-carrying fracturing fluid, causing erosion and wear failures in the engineering field. In this work, an erosion model that considers particle turbulent kinetic energy and the effect of the design’s structural parameters on the erosion wear of spatial pipe structures is established using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Structural parameters such as the bending diameter ratio, bending angle and spatial angle are discussed, and the location and degree of each parameter with regard to the erosion rate are obtained. The results show that the included angle of the pipe elbow has the greatest influence on erosion wear among the structural parameters. Several typical anti-erosion optimization models are compared and analysed, and a corrugated anti-erosion structure based on a bionic structure is further proposed. It is found that the anti-erosion performance of the T-type blind long header pipe is better in terms of the numerical value of the erosion rate, while for the erosion cloud diagram, the anti-erosion performance of the corrugated structure is superior. Finally, some suggestions for the application of the anti-erosion structure in the engineering field are given, and technical support is provided for the anti-erosion structure design and practical application of space pipeline systems in the future.