Relationship between wear formation and large-particle motion in a pipe bend

Abstract

Fine and large particles flowing through a bend in a pipe move differently and therefore erode the pipe differently. This paper simulates solid–liquid two-phase flow containing large particles in a bend and analyses the relationship between the wear formation and particle motion. Wear experiments are carried out using 3-mm glass bead particles at a mass concentration of 1–15%. At the same time, the flow field and the motion of the granular system are obtained in computational fluid dynamics–discrete element method simulation. The wear formation mechanism is revealed by comparing experiments with numerical simulations. The wear rate of the wall surface increases with the mass concentration, while the marginal growth rate decreases as the mass concentration increases. As the mass concentration increases to a certain value, the degree of wear reaches a maximum and remains unchanged subsequently because of the formation of a particle barrier along the bend wall. The particles near the wall region will bounce forward because of the periodic disturbance flow around particles. The impact of mass bouncing particles causes the formation of the erosion ripple on the test sheet.