Numerical study of a small-dimensional volume roller pump

One of the solutions to reduce capital and operating costs for oil production can be the development of energy-intensive equipment with increased reliability characteristics. The work is devoted to the study of the design of a volumetric multistage roller rotary pump. Experimentally observing the behavior of fluid inside a pump during operation is expensive, but predictive tools based on computational fluid dynamics, have emerged as a viable alternative approach to pump design and optimization. The article presents the results of a numerical study of a roller pump in the Ansys Fluent software package using a dynamically tunable mesh by the overset mesh method. A method for studying the working volume of chambers separated by roller partitions is proposed. Analysis of the pump operation showed the characteristic pulsation of the values of the main parameters. For a pump with an operating speed of 3000 rpm, a chamber diameter of 40 mm and a productivity at a given speed of 15 m3/day, an increase in amplitude is observed at the initial moment of time and after about 6 seconds from the beginning of the simulation a quasi-stationary mode appears. The flow rate at the outlet is 1 mm/s, at the inlet 0.5 mm/s, the torque values on the pump shaft are in the range from -0.02 N·mm to 0.14 N·mm, the shaft power is from ‒ 2 N·mm/s to 12 N·mm/s, shaft rotation speed from 70 to 130 rps. All pump parameters correlate with the fluid flow rate at the pump inlet. Keywords: fuel and energy complex; oil and gas industry; well equipment; volumetric rotor pump; computational fluid dynamics; numerical simulation; moving mesh.