Jaime F. Gómez's theses
by
Jaime F. Gómez, MSE
University of Texas at Austin, 2000
Supervisor: Augusto L. Podio
Sucker rod pumps have been used widely for several decades in the oil industry.
Although the economic benefits have been positive there are several malfunctions that
generate high economic expenses. This is because the dynamics of sucker rod pumping
has not been completely understood in part due to the difficulties of obtaining bottom
hole pumping data.
A full scale beam pumping system, including a transparent sucker rod pump has
been instrumented with pressure transducers at the inlet, inside the barrel and at the
discharge of the pump to measure these pressures in the pump while it is stroking. To
measure the position and the load of the polished rod the conventional beam balanced
unit has been instrumented with a position and a load cell transducers. Two virtual
instruments were developed to acquire, process, display and store both signals from the
transducers and images from the video camera.
The instrumented laboratory has allowed and facilitated the acquisition of the
bottom hole data at high speed. The data has been collected at 1000 samples a second, so
that transient behavior can be observed to study the effects of pumping speed on pump
efficiency.
Pressure drops through the traveling valve and the standing valve and dynamic
and static friction for the pump and the stuffing box have also been quantified.
Additionally, the unseating mechanism of the traveling valve ball has been studied with
synchronization recorded data and images. Finally, surface dynagrams for several
pumping conditions were modeled based on the measured pump pressures.
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