An Alternative Approach to Simulating an Entire Particle Erosion Experiment

Solid particle erosion affects many areas, such as dust or volcanic ash in areo-engines. The development of protective materials and surface engineering is costly and time consuming. A lot of effort has been placed into the advancement of models to speed up this process. Finite element or discrete element-based models are quite successful in predicting single or multiple impacts. However, they reach their limit if an entire erosion experiment is to be simulated. Therefore, in the present work, an approach is presented which combines various aspects of the former models with probability considerations. It is used to simulate the impact of more than one billion Alumina particles onto a steel substrate. This approach permits the simulation of an entire erosion experiment on an average PC (i5-2520M CPU@2.5 GHz processor, 4 GB main memory) within about six hours. The respective predictions of wear scar and impact-mass/mass-loss curve are compared to the real experiment