Effect of cell size on erosion representation and recommended practices in CFD

Erosion occurs in many industrial processes which results in economic losses and environmental issues. Having a more confident prediction method has always been the goal of the erosion community. Numerous studies have investigated erosion prediction utilizing Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and many have obtained seemingly good agreement with experimental data. However, the uncertainties resulting from the grid size on erosion representation has not been investigated thoroughly. In this paper, one-way coupled discrete phase and Eulerian flow models are utilized to examine the effect of cell size on erosion calculated by CFD. It is found that both erosion pattern and magnitude can be easily affected by the grid size. Thus, an appropriate cell size range used to represent local erosion magnitude and the full erosion profile is proposed. The study provides guidelines for engineers to predict erosion in gas pipelines and quantify the uncertainties in a more deterministic fashion.