Performance analysis of pump materials employed in bottom ash slurry erosion conditions

In this paper, a study was performed to analyze the slurry erosion in pump materials employed in bottom ash slurry erosion. A design of experiments technique namely Taguchi's method was utilized to design a set of experiments (4x4). In this study, the pump materials namely SS316L, SS304, SDSS2507 and grey C.I. were chosen. Materials were eroded by the preparing the bottom ash slurry of concentration 30-60% (by weight) with the help of a bench scale propeller type pot tester. The speed of tester was varied in a range from 600 to 1500 rev/min during the experiments. Bottom ash slurry of different particle sizes was prepared using British standard sieves. The average particle diameter was taken as an influencing parameter in the design of experiments technique. Results show that the all the influencing parameters were responsible for the slurry erosion in all the materials. The speed of particles was the most influencing parameters as compared to the other parameters. However, the higher hardness was the reason of high erosion resistance of SS316 than that of SS304 and SS2507. Grey C.I. showed the least hardness and erosion resistance amongst the pump materials.