Prediction of the impact wear of a valve

The valves used in the oil&gas industry often experience erosion due to the impingements of solids dragged by the extracted fluid. The considerable economic damages related to this phenomenon enhance the interest in techniques for predicting the location of the erosion hotsposts and the loss of material from the valve under aggressive flow conditions. CFD codes are often equipped with utilities for erosion estimation which rely on an Eulerian-Lagrangian model for two-phase flow computation and an erosion correlation for estimating the material removal caused by each particle-wall impingement. However, both the Eulerian-Lagrangian model and the erosion correlations include a number of uncertain submodels and parameterizations of empirical nature which, unless properly defined, may result in inaccurate predictions. Unfortunately, the difficulty in obtaining repeatable experimental data regarding valve erosion may hinder significant improvements in this field. This study is the first step of a research that has just started and it will soon involve the execution of experimental tests. Here we simulate the liquid-solid flow through a valve after characterizing the device in single-phase flow conditions, with the aim of finding the parameters which mainly affect the erosion estimates, in terms of identification of the area subjected to wear and quantification of the material loss. In the lack of experimental data, these parameters quantify the reliability of the erosion predictions. Moreover, the obtained numerical results will help in defining the flow conditions to be tested in our rig, in order to face the valve erosion issue from a numericalexperimental perspective.