Small Particle vs. Larger Particles Erosion Testing and Modeling (in liquid dominant flows)

Small particles are highly affected by turbulence and they can easily get trapped in recirculation areas. Therefore, many different numerical studies such as CFD simulations have been performed to predict the erosion behavior of these small particles. Most of these studies have shown that further studies are needed on this topic to correctly predict the erosive behavior of small particles. According to these studies CFD has been found to be incapable of predicting the order of magnitude of erosion or erosion pattern or in some cases both. There have been great developments in predicting small particle behavior at E/CRC, but additional CFD work is needed to help unify previous studies.

Current work in this area is to review and reevaluate all previous work, while evaluating erosion models for small particles. Additional experiments for a simple direct impact geometry is also conducted to further evaluate these models. In order to do so, the erosion tests are performed for both small and large particle sizes. This will help us evaluate whether or not the same erosion model would work for all particle sizes. Moreover, predictions from CFD are compared to the experimental data for various particle sizes.