Investigation of maximum erosion zone in the horizontal 90° elbow

Sand transportation within flow devices causes major problems for the hydrocarbon production industry and entails crucial material removal from pipelines and leads to failure and malfunction of the piping system. The 90° elbow configuration is an indispensable flow changing device used to redirect the flow direction in hydrocarbon and mineral processing industries. This paper highlights a comprehensive approach to quantify erosion in 90° elbow configuration ensues from fine particle transportation with the carrier fluid. A multilayer paint modeling (MPM) technique and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) are adopted to map the erosion distribution inside the elbow under liquid�solid flow in a flow loop setup. The experiments for horizontal-to-horizontal (H�H) orientation elbow with 50.8 mm inner diameter are performed with fine sand of 50 μm size entertains in a carrier fluid at 3 m/s. The high erosion zones have been located near the outlet of the 90° elbow under fine particle impact with a maximum erosion rate of 1.82 mm/year in horizontal�horizontal (H�H) oriented elbow. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd 2020.