Advancing Suction Performance in Hydrocarbon Liquids

Details are presented on design investigations to advance the suction performance of inducers combined with centrifugal impellers for pumping liquid hydrocarbons such as liquefied natural gas (LNG). In particular minimizing the NPSHr₃ is emphasized over the entire flow range. Design advances are made with the combined efforts of computational fluid dynamics, analytical methods, and test results. In particular the focus here is on inducer flow incidence and resulting blade loading by examining the NPSHr₃ performance of the variable pitch and constant pitch helical style inducers for use over the full flow rate range taken as 35% to 130% of the pump BEP. Results indicate the combined centrifugal impeller with a variable pitch inducer tends to have lower NPSHr₃ at BEP and below the pump BEP flow rate, but the constant pitch inducer can have superior performance near the pump maximum flow rate.