Research on erosion wear of high-pressure pipes during hydraulic fracturing slurry flow

Abstract The frequent erosion of high-pressure pipelines (HPP) is one of the most serious problems in petroleum industry. Since HPP is designed for hydraulic fracturing operations, the tubing wall is prone to be affected by non-uniform erosions caused by slurries with high rates. The erosion in multiphase flow is not widely understood and previous work has mostly focused on single phase. This paper studied the slurry erosion of HPP during hydraulic fracturing slurry flow. Through failure analysis of high-pressure elbows based on its macroscopic features and scanning electron microscope (SEM), the failure cause and failure mechanism are obtained. Depending on the failure analysis, an erosion wear test rig and experiment approach is developed to extract the main parameters influencing on erosion wear. As a result of the erosion wear experiment, the erosion model in ANSYS-FLUENT software is established. The wear distribution of pipes under different connections are obtained by CFD numerical simulation method, the experiment validates the consistency of the erosion wear results from CFD method and the field inspection. The study may provide references to carry out the optimization design, installation strategy and detection scheme for HPP and make sure the safety of the whole technological process.