Mathematical model of erosion wear of pipeline elements in pneumatic conveying systems for bulk materials

The operation of pneumatic conveying systems for bulk materials is accompanied by intensive erosion wear of the pipe walls, which is most pronounced at bends and largely governs the service life of the equipment. Common computational approaches based on coupled computational fluid dynamics and discrete element method (CFD-DEM) simulations require considerable computational cost and are impractical for parametric studies of long pipelines with numerous bends. This paper proposes a one-dimensional mathematical model of the erosion wear of straight horizontal, straight vertical, and bend pipe elements. The specific wear is represented as the sum of contributions from the impact and frictional mechanisms. The impact component is described by Oka’s generalized empirical correlation, while the frictional component is based on a sliding-wear law for the dispersed-phase layer moving along the pipe wall. The model was validated against experimental data, with calibration to a single reference point for each data set. The median relative deviation between the computed and experimental values was 4.6–9.9 % for the gas-velocity dependence in the dilute regime, 5–21 % for the mass-loading dependence, and 19% in the transitional regime. Straight pipe sections and the dense-phase regime in its pure form require further verification.
EDN: XZPSRK, https://elibrary/xzpsrk

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