Choosing a Booster Pump 1

[DaEarl]

Greetings all,

I am new to the design of pumping systems and in fact I am fresh out of school. Anyways, I am working a project where I must spec out a new booster pump for our products transfer. This booster (vertical 3 stg. turbine) boosts flow to three larger pumps in parallel. These three larger pumps then discharge to the pipeline company and then on to market. The point of the project is to raise our flowrate about 30%. However, this existing booster will run out on its curve at 11000 bbl/h and thus the need for a new pump. Besides the NPSHA & flowrate for the booster, what other conditions might the pump people need? All I can think of is the fluid properties (SG,visc). Or maybe the end conditions (i.e. discharge of booster/suction side of 3 transfer pumps) at the suction side of the three pumps in parallel.

Kyle

 

[LCEngr]

The best way to confirm that you are providing complete information for the vendor is to fill out an API 610 data sheet. It will ask for all the info they will need. Not only do you need to provide hydraulic but electrical information.

 

[JJPellin]

I would have a few words of caution based on similar projects that went awry. Beware of specifying suction conditions that are not realistic. If you ask what the minimum tank level will be and the maximum product temperature and the lowest possible specific gravity, you need to be cautious how you combine those answers. If you ask the pump company to quote a pump that can take the lightest product at the highest temperature with the lowest level, they may quote a pump with a very low NPSH required and thus a very high suction specific speed. But can those extreme conditions every really happen? In our case, for all three of those "planets to align" would be a once in a hundred year event. If we had designed our booster pumps for that triple jeapardy event, we would probably have had much poorer reliability for the other 99.9% of the time. You need to understand the true variation in those parameters and make a realistic evaluation for how extreme the combinations might be. We decided to accept some cavitation during extreme level, temperature, gravity events in exchange for better reliabilty the rest of the time.