Effect of Thickness Ratio Coefficient on the Mixture Transportation Characteristics of Helical–Axial Multiphase Pumps

With the decrease of oil and gas resources on land, increased attention has been paid to multiphase oil–gas exploitation and the transportation technology represented by oil–gas multiphase pumps. The helical–axial multiphase pump has become the focus of research on oil and gas mixed transmission technology due to its relatively high operating efficiency and adaptability to a wide range of gas volume fraction changes. In order to investigate the thickness variation in the air foil from the hub to the shroud of the blade on the mixture transportation characteristics of the gas–liquid two-phase flow in a helical–axial pump, the thickness ratio coefficient ξ was introduced, and the hydraulic performance of the single compression unit with different thickness ratio coefficients was investigated. A single compression unit including an impeller, diffuser, inlet section and outlet section of a helical–axial multiphase pump. The hydraulic performance including the hydraulic head and efficiency was investigated by numerical simulation with the Eulerian multiphase model and the shear stress transport (SST) k-w turbulence model. In order to demonstrate the validity of the numerical simulation approach, the hydraulic head and efficiency of the basic model was measured based on a gas–liquid two-phase flow pump performance test bench. The simulation results agreed well with the experimental results; the error between the simulation results and experimental results of different inlet gas volume fractions was within 10% at the design point, which indicated the numerical simulation method can be used in the research. The thickness ratio coefficient ξ, which was taken as a variable, and the aggregation degree λ of the gas were introduced to analyze the gas–liquid mixture transportation characteristics of the pump. The thickness ratio coefficient was selected in a range from 0.8 to 1.8. The results showed that, for the same hub thickness, the head coefficient and efficiency increase, and the aggregation degree of gas decreases with the decreasing of the thickness ratio coefficient. The head coefficient of the modification multiphase pump was 5.8% higher in comparison to the base pump while the efficiency was 3.1% higher than that of the base pump, the aggregation degree of this model was the lowest, which was 30.3%; the optimal model in the research was the model of scheme 1 with ξ = 0.8. The accumulation of gas in the flow passage of the impeller could be delayed to the trailing edge of the blade by adjusting the thickness ratio coefficient, which produced a super-separated airfoil for helical–axial multiphase pumps and effectively ensured reliable operation under high gas volume fraction conditions. The accumulation area of gas was consistent with the area in which the gradient of turbulent kinetic energy was large.