Is it possible to calculate the surface degradation of a pipeline

[west_cost]

Is it possible to calculate the surface degradation of a pipeline that water is flowing through it using FEA?

 

[xxChrisxx]

Normal FEA, no. Also do you acutally mean corrosion or wear? If it's acutally corrosion I don't know of any software (akin to FEA) that predicts that.

I suppose you could use some fluid structure interaction software or some dynamics based softare to predict wear rates.

This is the kind of thing that's just emprically tested, even if you do get some figures from the software, you would have no idea if they are sensible or not.

 

[west_cost]

I meant the wear rate which I think it is due to corrosion. FLUENT can be used to predict the shear stress of the flow. But how could I used this data to calculate the wear rate? Can you suggest me any formula?

 

[xxChrisxx]

CFD or FEA programmes alone won't do the job, it's not a trivial problem so a formula isn't a silver bullet. At the very least you'd probably need to use FSI software to do a full simulation. However if you can estimate wear rates (from testing) it's becomes a simple maths problem, and you could model different variables in Matlab.

Like I said in reality this kind of problem is solved by practical testing. I mean it depends massively on the conditions and materials involved.

So for example: pure water/oil against against a very smooth and hardened stainless steel will give you totally different wear rates to water + some grit suspended in it flowing through a soft steel.

There will be someone one here with more knowledge of this than me.