Comparison of wear models using a lagrangian approach

Abstract

Abrasive wear of hydraulic machines is commonly simulated with grid based methods. In this work we present a mesh-free approach for modeling abrasive wear. The transport fluid is modeled with the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics method. The ad- vantage of this method is the simple handling of free surfaces and complex interfaces, e.g., the interface between the fluid and the abrasive particles. The small solid particles and the boundary geometry of the machine are simulated with the Discrete Element Method. The amount of removed material on the boundary geometry is predicted with three wear models with different complexity. We simulate the impact of a free jet with particle load- ing on a simplified pelton bucket as working example. The resulting wear patterns of the three different wear models are analyzed and compared. In this work we take the parameters for the wear models from literature.