CFD Analysis of Erosion in Plugged Tees Series: Effect of Pipe Diameter, Particle Size and Fluid Density

Abstract Erosion in industrial piping systems poses a significant challenge across oil and gas, chemical processing, and power generation sectors, where particulate-laden flows degrade components over time. This wear phenomenon is particularly acute in plugged tee junctions due to complex flow patterns, sudden directional changes, and localized particle impacts that accelerate material loss. The resulting erosion compromises structural integrity, increases maintenance costs, and raises safety risks potentially leading to unplanned shutdowns or catastrophic failures. This study presents a systematic computational investigation of erosion dynamics in plugged tees to capture the gas-solid flow behavior. Three key parameters are evaluated in this study. First are the pipe diameters (2", 4”) to assess geometric scaling effects on erosion hotspots, second is the particle sizes (25 μm, 75 μm, 300 μm) representing fine abrasives to coarse erosive particles, and last is gas densities 0.816 kg/m3, 1.225 kg/m3 and 26.1 kg/m3 low, medium and high density. Constant gas velocity was used which is 15m/s. The present work serves as a benchmark to calibrate CFD models for predicting erosion in plugged tees. Furthermore, detailed flow and particle information are extracted from the CFD models, facilitating the development of mechanistic models in future to generalize particle and erosion dynamics in plugged tees under gas-sand flow condition.

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