Predicting Solid Particle Erosion and Uncertainty in Elbows by Artificial Intelligence Methods

AI approaches include machine learning algorithms in which models are trained from existing data to predict the behavior of the system for previously unseen cases. Recent studies at the Erosion/Corrosion Research Center (E/CRC) have shown that these methods can be quite effective in predicting erosion. However, these methods are not widely used in the engineering industries due to the lack of work and information in this area. Moreover, in most of the available literature, the reported models and results have not been rigorously tested. This fact suggests that these models cannot be fully trusted for the applications for which they are trained. Therefore, in this study three machine learning models, including Elastic Net, Random Forest and Support Vector Machine (SVM), are utilized to increase the confidence in these tools. First, these models are trained with a training data set. Next, the model hyper-parameters are optimized by using nested cross validation. Finally, the results are verified with a test data set. This process is repeated several times to assure the accuracy of the results. In order to be able to predict the erosion under different conditions with these three models, six main variables are considered in the training data set. These variables include material hardness, pipe diameter, particle size, liquid viscosity, liquid superficial velocity, and gas superficial velocity. All three studied models show good prediction performances. The Random Forest and SVM approaches, however, show slightly better results compared to Elastic Net. The performance of these models is compared to both CFD erosion simulation results and also to Sand Production Pipe Saver (SPPS) results, a mechanistic erosion prediction software developed at the E/CRC. The comparison shows SVM prediction has a better match with both CFD and SPPS. The application of AI model to determine the uncertainty of calculated erosion is also discussed.