EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF EROSION WEAR IN MULTI-SIZE PARTICULATE FLOW USING POT-TESTER

Abstract

All industries like thermal power plant, petroleum industries, mining industries etc. use simple as well as
complex pipeline structure along with centrifugal pumps for the transportation of slurry and these slurry transportation
equipments suffer from erosion wear. Erosion wear is a very crucial parameter for selection and design of slurry
transportation system, as it affects directly to the economy of hydraulic conveyance of solids. The service life of
equipment handling solid-liquid mixture is limited due to wear. Present work is focusing on erosion wear, as conditions
of erosion wear i.e. high velocity and low impact angle mostly occur in practice while transportation of slurry. It is
difficult to observe the types and rates of deformation in operating condition. Thus an attempt has been made in current
study to do a parametric study of wear at high concentration using pot tester and test specimens of two different
materials. Experimental results obtained from different test conditions may help in identifying the time for replacement of
piping in long slurry fluid flow and also in centrifugal slurry pump impeller blade. The experimental method determines
the effect of slurry velocity, solid concentration and impact wear angle on erosion wear. Current work also attempts to
validate the calculated values from experimental setup(pot tester) against established relations in the literature, by
plotting graph using R software.