Leakage Analysis of Metal Progressive Cavity Pump

Ramasamy Karthikeshwaran

Department of Petroleum Engineering, AMET University, Chennai - 603 112, India.

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.13005/bbra/1431

ABSTRACT: A Progressive cavity pump is an artificial lifting technique used in oil and gas industries to pump heavy and sandy fluids from the low bottom hole pressure wells. The pump is a positive displacement pump having rotor and stator as the main component of the pump. The performance of pump gets decreased as the clearance between the rotor and stator increases. Increasing fluid viscosity has positive effect on the performance. The performance degradation of the pumpoccurs due to leakage flow through the least clearance gap between the rotor and stator. A computational work has been performed to find the characteristics of the leakage flow and Ansys CFX 12.1 software was used for the simulations. Meshing and solving of the fluid dynamics equation were done by Ansys CFX mesh and CFX solver, respectively. Present article presents the prediction of leakage for different fluid viscosities and diametric clearances.It was found that the rotor rotation helps in leakage flow if the flow and rotor surface velocity directions are same.

KEYWORDS: Artificial lift; Leakage; progressive cavity pump; interference fit

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