Good day all.

A water pump by the impulsion/carrier of rising bubbles in a hose/tube. (Taylor flow) 'geyser pump' - 'bubble pump' - 'airlift' pump

Image borrowed from the web. (b. is a picture of bubbles rising in clear pipes)

To simplify, for plain water and air fluids; The variables inlet immersion level (inlet suction) ; the inlet diameter , the outlet tube diameter, the head (pumping height above surface), the air pumped flow, the air pumping pressure range available... bubbles size... how to prevent air escaping under the air injection port trough the water inlet ?... Is there a head limit ? Are these variables managed when designing this product or industry would just do trial/error ?

Recommended Citation

Wang, Yanbo, "A Study Of Two-Phase Flow Regime And Pressure Drop In Vertical Pipe" (2018). Theses and Dissertations. 2435.

https://commons.und.edu/theses/2435

I'm not going to go through the full paper, but the correlation maps on pps 4-5 (horizontal and vertical flow respectively) are well-established. I've used them often in designing 2-phase steam/condensate systems, and elsewhere.

Abstract

In the oil industry, after the wellbore is drilled into a reservoir, oil and gas will flow into the bore hole and can be transported to the earth’s surface through tubing. Multiphase flow will take place in the pipe. Flow regime has a significant influence on production. For example, the slug flow will cause a huge pressure-drop in the surface system and can even cause a shut-down of the well.Therefore, it is important to test two-phase upwards flow in the pipe.

Different kinds of characteristics are used to distinguish between different kinds of flow patterns. I introduce the development of flow pattern and some methods which were applied to select and determine essential parameters, such as volume fluxes rate, fluid density, viscosity, and surface tension to classify flow regime. The pressure change in the vertical tube is a summation of three factors: friction and liquid-gas interface, gravity, acceleration changing. And making an explain of the pressure drop in sucker rod pumping systems, friction force due to the movement of the plunger and the rod, buoyant force, and gravity force are including in the model.

In order to test flow regime changing and pressure-drop in two-phase upwards flow. I created a two-phase flow loop experiment, and choose to use different diameter tubes to have a comparison. The water and air flow velocities range from 0.01 to 20 m/s and 0.05 to 10 m/s, separately. I also set up a model in Ansys-Fluent to simulate the pressure drop and flow regime change in the test tube. With the comparison of the simulation result and the real experiment. The pressure-drop depends on both the diameter changing and water/air inlet superficial velocities, both of the results are coincide.