The use of high-viscosity fluids is common in a wide range of manufacturing environments, everything from food & beverage production to the drilling and refining of oil & natural gas. Regardless of the application, high-viscosity fluids can be challenging to handle and can require specific industrial pumps and flow meters to optimize both efficiency and productivity.
There are some industrial applications where centrifugal pumps simply aren’t the best tool for the job. In most instances, this is because the industrial application calls for the use of medium-to-high-viscosity fluids or liquids that contain a high percentage of entrained gasses. Such applications are most commonly found in the oil and gas, concrete, chemical, and petrochemical industries.
Regardless of whether you’re an upstream, midstream, or downstream producer in the oil & gas industry, there is much to learn and understand about the right industrial pump to help you overcome unique challenges and achieve efficiency, sustainability, and productivity goals.
What are the main differences between centrifugal and reciprocating industrial pumps? From pump construction and design to operation and reliability, centrifugal and reciprocating pumps offer different benefits and therefore have different ideal applications. Here we break down some of those differences to help you select the pump that best suits your needs.
There’s often much confusion in today’s general manufacturing space about the true nature of positive displacement pumps. In fact, PD pumps are frequently lumped together with centrifugal pumps, which further muddies the waters in terms of how PD pumps work, their real-world value proposition, and which industries or applications are the best fit to maximize performance.
The good news for you is that the confusion, conflation, and chaos around positive displacement pumps ends here. Today. With this very blog entry. We’ll start with a simple, workable definition. PD pumps trap fixed amounts of fluid within the system to create a constant, consistent flowrate that is independent of pressure. Additionally, because of this consistent nature of fluid movement, PD pumps are a mission-critical tool for environments where high-degrees of dosing accuracy is key.