Study on the Labyrinth Screw Pump for Heavy Oil Production

Abstract As widely used in onshore and offshore oil production, the electrical submersible pumps (ESPs) suffer from significant performance degradation for producing high-viscosity hydrocarbon fluids. In this paper, a new design of the labyrinth screw pump (LSP) is proposed to facilitate the high-viscosity oil production, which may partially replace the application scenarios of ESPs for heavy oil extraction. Based on the cellular supercharging theory proposed by Golubiev, a prototype of LSP was designed and manufactured, while an experimental facility was built up to test pump's performance at different rotational speeds and viscosity fluids. A fitting function was used to summarize the influence of different operating conditions on the H-Q curves by regression analysis. The applicability of the affinity law to LSPs was verified, which is widely used in centrifugal pump performance analysis. The internal flow characteristics was investigated by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. With the obtained results, the dimensionless flow and head coefficients of LSPs were able to be correlated by a non-linear relationship. Compared to ESPs, LSPs were found to be more suitable for conveying highly viscous fluids.