Solid-particle erosion in the tube end of the tube sheet of a shell-and-tube heat exchanger

Erosion is one of the major problems in many industrial processes, and in particular, in heat exchangers. The effects of flow velocity and sand particle size on the rate of erosion in a typical shell-and-tube heat exchanger were investigated numerically using the Lagrangian particle-tracking method. Erosion and penetration rates were obtained for sand particles of diameters ranging from 10 to 500 μm and for inlet flow velocities ranging from 0.197 to 2.95 m/s. A flow visualization experiment was conducted with the objective of verifying the accuracy of the continuous phase calculation procedure. Comparison with available experimental data of penetration rates was also conducted. These comparisons resulted in a good agreement. The results show that the location and number of eroded tubes depend mainly on the particle size and velocity magnitude at the header inlet. The rate of erosion depends exponentially on the velocity. The particle size shows negligible effect on the erosion rate at high velocity values and the large-size particles show less erosion rates compared to the small-size particles at low values of inlet flow velocities. The results indicated that the erosion and penetration rates are insignificant at the lower end of the velocity range. However, these rates were found to increase continuously with the increase of the inlet flow velocity fal all particle sizes. The particle size creating the highest erosion rate was found to depend on the flow velocity range.