Investigation of erosion of stainless steel by two-phase jet impingement

The study has been conducted to assess the performance of 304, 316 and the effect of various working conditions under high velocity jet impingement in various types of media containing particles in normal water. Mass loss per unit area vs. exposure time is used to evaluate the erosion rate of the stainless steel. The surface morphologies before and after the erosion tests are observed by High-power optical microscope and scanning electron microscopy. The results show that particle concentration and particle size have significant effects on the mass loss of stainless steel. In addition, the type of particles and steels do effects on it. The maximum erosion rate is found to occur in the testing duration around 12-15 h and the erosion mechanism for different impact angle is obviously different. Using Finnie's cutting model, the calculation result agrees well with the experiment results and demonstrates that both target materials wear follow a linear relationship with the kinetic energy of impinging particles. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.