The Impact of Sand Erosion in Gas Export Pipelines

One of the common problems in oil and gas industry is sand erosion. Fine sand was believed to cause insignificant erosion damage. It was believed that fine sand cause insignificant erosion damage. The aims of this study are to explore and investigate sand erosion due to particle size, sand flow rate, air velocity, impact angle and distance between nozzle and pipe which cause erosion in gas pipelines by measuring the thickness loss of pipe. This study is the lab based study. The different sizes sand, carbon steel plates, air blower and mixing chamber are used in the experiment. The experiment has three stages. The first stage is sand and metal plate sampling. The sand is characterized into two different sizes, coarse sand and fines by using dry sieving method. The metal plates are polished and then several images of surface before experiment are captured. These images are categorised as untreated sample. Then, second stage is the erosion experiment which the concept is almost same with “sand blasting” concept and each experiment are run for 3 hours with different parameters. Last stage is the most important part. The surfaces of eroded metals are analysed using Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) and Universal Scanning Probe Microscope (USPM).