Abstract
Understanding the failure mechanism due to erosion helps in introducing predictive means for parts that are vulnerable to erosion-corrosion effects, such as elbows. This paper is concerned with studying the behavior of steel elbows working in erosive environments. Rates of iron losses due to both flow rate variations and sand concentration variations were investigated. In order to avoid interference from other parts of the system, a PVC test rig, fitted with only one steel elbow at a time, was constructed. The flow rate was controlled to cover both the laminar and turbulent flow regimes. The sand concentration varied from nil up to 9 grams per liter. A spectrophotometer was utilized to measure the quantity of iron losses. Results showed that the critical sand concentration for the erosion mechanism is 3 g/l. Also an empirical formula was developed for estimating the erosion-corrosion rate in laminar and turbulent flow regimes with different sand contamination levels.