Numerical prediction of erosion in a choke valve

Abstract

Erosion wear in pipelines due to multiphase flows is a well-known problem in the petroleum production and transport industries. There are several different ways to predict the erosion damage on the system investigated. Nevertheless, there are very few studies of erosion on choke valves and it is still unclear which models should be selected. Different geometries give different flow profiles and therefore different erosion patterns. Knowledge of where and what magnitude the erosion wear occurs is crucial to obtain efficient and economical production and choke valve design. In this research, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with the Lagrangian modeling methodology, was used to examine the erosion wear on a choke valve in a pipeline. The first part of this thesis focused on finding the best-suited erosion wear model for the system. Furthermore, analysis of the impact of particle size and rebound coefficients was performed for the best-suited erosion models. To predict erosion wear using CFD analysis there are three main steps: flow modeling, particle tracking and calculating the erosion wear from the particle interactions.