The effect of particle hardness on the erosion of stainless steel has been studied with fine particles at low impacting velocities with two experimental apparatuses, submerged configuration with slurry mix and mist flow test with solid particles entrained in the droplets. Particle concentration was 1% by mass and the tests have been run for 72 h. The testing particles include iron powder, calcite, barite, hematite, magnetite, silica flour, alumina and silicon carbide which are smaller than 40 mu m with Vickers's hardness of 65-3000 kgf mm(-2). A Particle Image Velocimeter (PIV) is used to measure droplet size and velocity for air/water tests, and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) with particle tracking scheme is implemented to estimate the particle impact velocities for both cases. The measured erosion ratio was consistent for most of the particles in the two testing configurations. It was observed that erosion ratio increases with increasing particle hardness when target material is harder than the particle and does not change considerably after a point where the particle is hard enough to keep its integrity during impact. A correlation has been proposed to correlate erosion ratio (mass of material loss/mass of particles) to the particle hardness by considering the effect of particle impact velocity and angularity of the particles. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
