Erosion is a wear damage caused by the impact of small and loose moving particles to the surface. In oil and gas production systems, particles (e.g. sand) are commonly entrained in the fluid, obtain the momentum, impact and erode the inner wall of the tubing. Particularly in such premium connections, erosion could be more serious.
It has been proved that Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) does well in modeling fluid flow and CFD-based erosion research due to its lower cost and more controllability is rather fruitful compared with experimental study. For dilute flow, the DPM erosion prediction research has been widely carried out and is still active. CFD-based erosion simulation usually consists of the following steps:
a) Flow modeling, including meshing, turbulence models, near wall treatments and fluid flow equations solving.
b) Discrete particle motion modeling, including particle tracking, discrete random walk model, particle wall interaction.
c) Erosion modeling.
In this paper, the CFD-DPM simulation is performed to study gas-particle two-phase flow in the premium connection tubing, which is a fluid-particle, particle-wall two-way coupling method. An empirical erosion model proposed by Tulsa University (Zhang et al, 2007) is applied to simulate erosion rate