Track: Undergraduate Research Presentation

Abstract

Economic considerations determine the selection of low-cost steel material such as carbon steel in oil and gas industry. However, there are situations where carbon steel is replaced by stainless steel especially when encountering aggressive brines that contains weak acid such as acetic acid. Stainless steel is known for its corrosion resistance. However, the erosion resistance of stainless steel is not well understood. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of sand particle size and velocity on the stainless steel erosion rate using sand blasting technique. Scanning Electron Microscope and Universal Scanning Probe Microscope were used to evaluate the erosion on the surface of the plates. The experimental results revealed that larger sized sand particles and higher gas flow velocity caused more severe erosion on the surface of the plates. The severity of the treated stainless steel plate was represented using the USPM cross sectional micrograph. The medium sized sand particles can cause 25º deep crater compared to fine sand with only 7º deep crater. Besides, high sand impact velocity of 22 m/s caused more erosion of 13º depth in the USPM cross sectional micrograph compared to 17 m/s which causing 7º deep erosion in the USPM micrograph.