Experimental Measurement of Multiphase Flow and CFD Erosion Modeling in Electrical Submersible Pumps

Electrical Submersible Pumps (ESPs) are widely being used in upstream oil production. To better understand the ESP pump?s behavior, two different ESPs, MVP-G470 and ESP-WJE1000, manufactured by Baker Hughes company have been studied experimentally and numerically to determine the pump and flow behavior in different operating conditions and for different working fluids.

The MVP-G470 is a multi-vane electrical submersible pump which has been designed to increase the gas handling capacity of typical multiphase ESPs up to 70% gas volume fraction. Homogenized flow and finer bubbles produced by MVP pumps help the ESPs to delay the surging and gas lock condition to higher gas volume fractions and operate effectively. In this work, an experimental study on the performance of a 3-stage MVP along with detail study on the performance of two stages of the pump are performed.

Overall pump performance for different operating conditions such as different inlet pressure, inlet gas volume fraction, water flow rate and speeds are performed for a mixture of water and air. Detail study of a stage performance is done on the first and second stage of the pump using conductivity and pressure measurements accompanied by high speed visualization. The data obtained from these measurements is employed to relate stage head degradation to effective parameters on the pump performance.

The ESP-WJE1000 is a typical mixed flow ESP pump with a single vane rather than split-vane design used in MVPs. Numerical study on the erosion phenomena in this pump has been performed. The influence of key parameters on erosion in ESPs has been identified and a new model to predict the erosion rate at different pump locations has been introduced.