KINEMATIC PARAMETERS OF THE OIL FLOW IN A VORTEX CHAMBER PUMP

Abstract

The difficult operating conditions of oil pumps require high levels of reliability, durability and efficiency from hydraulic machines. The gas dissolved in oil leads to the appearance of regions with variable density in the pumps flow parts and to a breakdown in performance. The use of jet pumps is limited due to low efficiency. Therefore, the operation of new vortex chamber pumps for oil production and transportation is quite promising due to the increase in pumping efficiency indicators using the advantages of centrifugal and jet technology in these pumps. On the other hand, to date, no studies have been carried out on the behavior of vortex chamber pumps when pumping oil. In this paper, based on the numerical calculation of the oil flow in a vortex chamber pump, the kinematic parameters of the flow are obtained with and without the dissolved gas in the oil. The calculation was made on the basis of solving the Reynolds equations, continuity and Rayleigh-Plesset equations in the Ansys CFX software package. For the first time for the vortex chamber pump when pumping oil, the distributions of the oil velocity and dissolved gas, the distributions of volumetric and mass concentrations, and the graphs of velocity distributions in various horizontal planes of the vortex chamber were obtained, which makes it possible to take into account the kinematic flow parameters in the vortex chamber for further optimal design. For the first time, on the basis of numerical calculations, the possibility of using vortex chamber pumps for pumping oil has been confirmed. At the same time, the efficiency is approximately 15%, which is almost twice the efficiency of direct-flow jet pumps used for this purpose. The choice of the model, according to which the calculation is carried out by numerical methods, has a significant impact on the accuracy of calculating the integral characteristics of the vortex chamber pump operation.