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A Preliminary Study of Slurry Pipeline Erosion Using a Toroid Wear Tester
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- Author / Creator
- Sarker, Nitish Ranjan
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Wear-related reliability issues, especially slurry erosion has become one of the principal concerns for the process industries that use slurry pipelines for coarse particle transport. The study and development of an appropriate wear model for slurry pipelines is, therefore, essential from the commercial perspective. The mechanism of slurry erosion is not well understood, and yet, the amount of pipeline wear data for accurate prediction of wear rate is limited. Since actual pipeline wear tests are slow and expensive, laboratory-scale wear testers are widely used, but in most cases, the particle-wall interactions are not similar to an operating pipeline. Limited, but favorable comparisons between pipeline wear and the Toroid Wear Tester (TWT) results have been stated in the literature. No detailed studies of the hydrodynamics or the performance of the TWT have been completed to date. In this study, a TWT was fabricated and used to investigate erosion under conditions meant to simulate slurry flows in a pipeline. Qualitative flow observations were made to better understand the slurry flow behavior and particle-coupon contact mechanisms. Controlled slurry erosion experiments were also conducted to evaluate the TWT performance. A preliminary assessment of the TWT hydrodynamics was completed by analyzing the surface roughness of test coupons and also from CFD analysis of a TWT containing only air and water. These results suggest that the TWT is a reasonable approach for some types of tests, e.g. capable of determining slurry abrasivity; however, it exhibits very different hydrodynamic behavior than a pipeline. The strength and limitations of the TWT were identified and reported in this preliminary study as a foundation for a more detailed hydrodynamic future analysis of the TWT.
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- Subjects / Keywords
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- Graduation date
- Fall 2016
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Master of Science
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- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.