MODELLING STUDIES USING CORROSIVE AND NON-CORROSIVE MATERIALS TO IMPROVE ON RELIABILITY AND EFFICIENCY OF AN IMPELLER OF A CENTRIFUGAL PUMP.

Abstract

The quest to improve on the reliability, operability, sustainability of centrifugal pumps in all facets of process operations which includes; oil and gas industries across the globe have a pivoted role to play in the development of world energy technology and sustainability in numerous ways. This is because several operability challenges and malfunctioning of centrifugal pumps can usually results to unexpected shutdown of process operations and mostly in cases with faulty standbys. Several researches have been conducted using experiment and numerical simulations to design the centrifugal pump impellers. As a result of recent research, the performance of contemporary centrifugal pump impellers yielded positive results. However, for sustainability there is a need to design the impellers using corrosive and non-corrosive materials to improve on its reliability and efficiency of the pump impeller is one of the key design parameters of the centrifugal pump, which has an important influence on the internal flow field and performance of centrifugal pump. In this paper, impeller models with different blade inlet and outlet angles (350 - 47°, 380 - 50°, and 410 - 53°) were designed via vista CPD under the basis of impeller parameters used, and numerical simulation was carried out in the commercial software ANSYS-CFX. Then the experiment was performed on three processes, that is, pre-processing, the solver and post-processing using corrosive fluids (Saline water, hydrochloric acid, methanol) and non-corrosive fluids (water at 1000C, gasoline, kerosene) to improve on reliability and efficiency of the impeller of centrifugal pump. The results of the pressure of impeller inlet first decreases and then increases, and the change trend of pressure distribution is consistent under different inlet and outlet angles and different corrosive and non-corrosive fluids. It can be seen that the relative velocity of the fluid in the impeller increases gradually, and the velocity has minimum value and smaller gradient in uniform flow at the impeller inlet. The performance of the impeller was simulated to improve is the reliability and efficiency for corrosive and non-corrosive fluids with different mass flowrate and head rise of 55m and various efficiency ranging from 67.55% to 94.21%. To verify the numerical result and analysis, the performance test apparatus for the centrifugal pumps was designed and built for further researches, and all the research results could provide appropriate reference for designers to select reasonable outlet angle. Keywords: Oil and gas, centrifugal pump, reliability, sustainability