Effects of injection mechanism on air-water air lift pump performance

Abstract

Due to its advantages, the air lift pump has many applications in real life. Therefore, the present study is dealing with the effect of some parameters on the air lift pump performance. The present study is a continuation of a program started years ago by the fluid mechanics group in Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University. Beginning by validating the obtained results of the experiment set-up by comparing these experimental results with international accepted sets of data. After that the present experiments shed some lights on the inlet injection region of the air lift pump due to the significant effect of its initial conditions on the pump efficiency. Thus the study directed towards investigating the effect of some parameters including the inlet restrictor resistance, the injection direction and the injector riser diameter. The upward injection technique shows higher peak efficiency of 34.7% compared to 29.7% and 28.9% for downward and side injection respectively while the larger injector inner diameter shows maximum water capacity of 928 kg/h. compared to 823 kg/h. water mass flow rate for the smaller inner diameter injector. In all the above experimental tests, flow visualization is used extensively giving a good agreement with well recognized flow pattern map.

Keywords

• Air lift pump
• Experimental
• Flow regime
• Injection
• Two phase flow