Numerical Simulation of Air-Lift Pump

Abstract

Now a days, it is a basic necessity to have a very highly reliable pump with low maintenance. Moreover, for pumping of various kind of fluid like corrosive, abrasive, or even radioactive, an air-lift pump is very much useful. The only negative point of the ALP is that it has very low efficiency. Therefore, the goal is to perform an exhaustive research to increase the performance of the air-lift pump. The purpose of the present effort is to capture the performance of air lift pump when it is operated in different flow regimes. To fulfill this objective, an air-lift pump is designed and numerically simulated using commercial software ANSYS. The results produced have been validated with the experimental data and have found to be in accordance with it. The pump works under two-phase flow condition with air and water as the two phases. Simulations were performed by varying the air mass flow rates. It is inferred that AMFR played a dominant role in improving the pump’s performance and efficiency. It is concluded that for obtaining a good efficiency in an ALP, it should be operated either in slug or slug-churn flow regime.