Design of Centrifugal Pump for Produced Water

Abstract

During the spring of 2008, Jón Bergmann Heimisson developed a pump design program in Matlab. The program has been further developed during the work with this thesis, as well as in the author's preceding project thesis, giving key information for an existing pump design. The aim of this Master's thesis has been to verify the calculation of pump characteristics and velocity profiles at the impeller outlet through testing.A detailed description of the relevant theory regarding pump design has been presented, and different calculation models for the pump characteristics have been examined. The analytical approaches for calculating the performance data have been implemented into Matlab, and a comparison of the different calculation models has been performed. A multistage centrifugal pump has been used for verifying the velocity profiles, and the pump characteristics have been compared to the different calculation models presented in Matlab. Measurements of the velocity profiles were carried out in Typhonix' laboratories at Varhaug using a pitot-static probe.The results achieved from the comparison of the characteristic curves calculated in Matlab showed that the models provide quite different results. Some of the methods widely used in the literature proved to deviate significantly from the measured results, while other and more advanced methods provided better results.The results achieved from testing the velocity profiles with the pitot-static probe were not as good as desired. The measured velocities and flow angles did not correlate well with the analytical solutions, and the results are partly unreliable. Some of the trends regarding changes due to increased volume flow or rotational speed were found, but the exact values could not be trusted. The pitot-static probe is an intrusive method, and it probably disturbed the flow in a way making good results difficult to achieve.