Wear Rate Comparison of Different Impeller Materials for Pumping Various Types of Slurry

Abstract

Erosive wear can as defined as solid deduction process from a solid superficial due to frictional action between the slurry and surface. It is triggered by the effect of solid particles contains by slurry in contradiction of the surface of a solid body. The impacting solid particles progressively take away material from the solid superficial due to cutting action. Erosive wear is a significant factor for design centrifugal pump impeller and pumping slurry. Impeller wear is a very common phenomenon for every industry and slurry transportation system. Slurry erosion takes place in our civilized life such as thermal power plants, hydro power plants, excavating businesses, food handling productions, construction and civil works, oil field, solid-liquid hydro transportation systems, coal liquefaction plants, and boilers. As the Slurry erosion related machinery or equipment demand is becoming so acute day-by-day, scientists are giving efforts on the aptitudes of utilizing applicable technologies to reduce erosion from the related machinery or equipment. As a result performance of slurry equipment, dependability and operation lifetime of the slurry equipment are significantly improved. Slurry erosion tester ordinarily used to investigate the comparative erosion behavior and characteristics of various materials expose to slurry at moderate solid concentrations. Slurry erosion tester is a modest and convenient apparatus to determine slurry erosion of different equipment. In this project, a pin mill type slurry-pot wear tester has been made. Total four types (aluminum, brass, mild steel and cast iron) of material with two geometries (flat bar and impeller) have been made for test. Slurry has been made by mixing silica sand and water by at required ratio in a GI container (slurry pot). All samples has been tested by the developed apparatus and determined wear rate with respect to various parameters like slurry density, shaft speed, impact angle and time. This apparatus is used for performing experiments on numerous samples of dissimilar materials exposed to slurry erosion. In this experiment, total four types of impeller material with two geometries is used for testing at different operating condition such as impact angle, velocity, density and time. Among the eight samples brass is more erosive for both type of geometries (Flat bar and Impeller). On the other hand, cast iron is less erosive for impeller type geometry (45-degree impact angle) but for flat bar type geometry (0-degree impact angle) mild steel is less erosive. If impact angle and density are increased, erosion is found to increase for all types of materials and geometries. From the obtained results, it is clear that by this testing apparatus different types of materials can be tested and suitable pump impeller materials for different application can be found out.