Design and Prototyping of Centrifugal Pump Impeller to be used as Water Injection Pump for Hydrocarbon Artificial Lift

Execution of maintenance activities for mechanical equipment is essential in order to preserve and enhance plant and equipment reliability. It is common especially during corrective and preventive maintenance activities to replace defective or to-be defective components. Typically the replacement components are procured through the original equipment manufacturer (OEM). However, due to the long lead-time delivery imposed by the OEM, an alternative means of procuring spares with shorter lead-time delivery should be established, in order to reduce the downtime of critical equipment should extreme cases such as repetitive failure of certain components occur. This project was carried out with such objective by studying the feasibility of locally designing and manufacturing mechanical components to reduce shipping time, and adopting rapid prototyping technology into spare parts manufacturing, to reduce manufacturing time. A centrifugal pump impeller was chosen to be designed and manufactured. The data of operating requirements of the particular pump was acquired from an existing water injection module in an actual oil field. The project started with impeller numerical design, establishing the geometry in numerical terms. The methodology was then preceded by impeller modeling, resulting in a virtual three dimensional representation of the designed impeller. The virtual model was then rapidly transformed into a solid wax prototype using rapid prototyping technology. The wax prototype was then directly used as a pattern for investment casting process, resulting in solid metallic model of the impeller. The whole processes duration and costs was recorded. A costs-time benefit analysis was carried out in the latter part of the project, to study the feasibility of the approaches adopted in this project, and to compare the its practicality to that of the conventional spare parts procurement through the OEM, in terms of costs and led-time delivery. It was concluded from the analysis, that this project dramatically reduced the lead-time delivery, and radically reduced the product’s costs. In conclusion, the approaches adopted in this project (locally designing, locally manufacturing, and introducing rapid prototyping into spare parts manufacturing) are verified to be very feasible and favorable as far as the lead-time delivery and costs are concerned. This project also adds to plant and equipment reliability by reducing equipment downtime thus enabling continuation of production and plant operation.