Erosion resistance of epoxy based composites

CAPIEL, GUILLERMINA; ARROSIO, FLORENCIA; PENOFF, MARCELA; MONTEMARTINI, PABLO

Buenos Aires

Conferencia; International Conference on Science and Technology of Composite Materials; 2015

CONICET

Due to their excellent properties, composites are extensively used as structural materials in various components and engineering parts in energy, aerospace, and marine applications. Composites as a replacement for steel offer an alternative material that in many cases improve the economics for developing oil and gas resources. Composites are already present in production operations including flow lines, gratings, structural material, fiberglass piping among others. Nevertheless, it is widely recognized that these materials have a poor erosion resistance against operational requirements of industrial environment. Specifically pipelines can suffer from erosion when a high-speed fluid is transported. Moreover, multiphase fluids, as sand slurries common in petroleum refining, expose the pipe line wall to severe conditions in which they may be subjected to erosion. In this work, a jet impingement system was developed in order to induce an erosion damage in an epoxy based composite material. In this way, the resistance of the composites studied can be compared by means of scanning electron microscopy (SEM), perfilometry, nanotriboindentation, etc. Besides, the erosion resistance is correlated to the composite mechanical properties. In the literature, erosion is commonly correlated to the bulk mechanical properties and the models employed to study metals are extrapolated and sometimes modified to study the polymers. Since the erosion is a surface phenomena, in this work also the composite surface mechanical properties where determined and employed in the models to correlate the erosion damage.