CFD-Based Design Improvement for Single-Phase and Two-Phase Flows Inside an Electrical Submersible Pump

Abstract

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is widely used to simulate fluid flows in turbomachinery. A detailed CFD study was performed to enhance the design of an electrical submersible pump (ESP) manufactured by Baker Hughes. The pump has a special patented impeller design enabling it to handle up to 70% gas volume fraction (GVF). A CFD-based design study was performed on the ESP diffuser (for the first time) to improve the pump’s performance and reduce losses. The CFD model was initially validated using experimental results. Different designs were simulated to reach the optimum design. Many factors affect pump performance, including flow separation losses in the stator (such as the number of blades, the meridional profile of the pump and the shape of the stator blades). In addition, a non-uniform flow while exiting one stage affects the rotor performance of the next stage. Therefore, improving the diffuser design improves the current stage performance as well as the performance of the next rotor. In this study, improved designs show that optimizing the stator design can increase the static pressure of the pump by 4% for single-phase flow, and 23% for two-phase flow in the simulated cases.

Application of computational fluid dynamics and surrogate-coupled evolutionary computing to enhance centrifugal-pump performance

“…Rutter, Sheth, and O'Bryan (2013) optimized the hydraulic performance of an electrical submersible pump (ESP) handling a single-phase fluid, with selected head, efficiency and input power as the objective functions. Cao, Peng, and Yu (2004), Shi, Long, Li, Leng, and Zou (2010) and Marsis, Pirouzpanahand, and Morrison (2013) also reported an improvement in pump performance by changing the design parameters. However, the evaluation of all the parameters for optimization requires a high-dimensional analysis that is even more time consuming.…”

“…After the completion of the problem formulation stage, a design space bounded by the two extreme (top and bottom) limits of the variables was created. The lower and upper bounds were determined via a literature survey (Bellary & Samad, 2014;Gulich, 2010;Li, 2002;Luo et al, 2008;Marsis et al, 2013;Ohta & Aoki, 1996), followed by simulations at the corners of the design space. A three-level full factorial design (Myers & Montgomery, 1995) was employed to choose the designs or design points from the design space.…”

Research Progress and Prospects of Multi-Stage Centrifugal Pump Capability for Handling Gas–Liquid Multiphase Flow: Comparison and Empirical Model Validation

“…Moreover, the transient simulation in combination with the sliding mesh method was helpful in predicting the dynamic flow behavior of the blade and volute tongue. On the other hand, unsteady multiphase CFD simulations were performed on multi-vane ESP by Marsis [99]. The purpose of this study was to provide some CFD design modification to improve both single and multiphase flow-handling ability of ESP impeller.…”

A Review of Experiments and Modeling of Gas-Liquid Flow in Electrical Submersible Pumps

“…However, the computational cost for transient CFD simulations is far more than that for steady-state simulations. Marsis et al [111] performed transient two-phase CFD simulations on eight multi-vane ESP designs. The predicted pump performance was confirmed by experimental results.…”