Pumps Are Used Throughout Society for a Variety of Purposes

Pumps are used throughout society for a variety of purposes. Early applications includes the use of the windmill or watermill to pump water. Today, the pump is used for irrigation, water supply, gasoline supply, air conditioning systems, refrigeration (usually called a compressor), chemical movement, sewage movement, flood control, marine services, etc. Because of the wide variety of applications, pumps have a plethora of shapes and sizes: from very large to very small, from handling gas to handling liquid, from high pressure to low pressure, and from high volume to low volume. Priming a pumpLiquid and slurry pumps can lose prime and this will require the pump to be primed by adding liquid to the pump and inlet pipes to get the pump started. Loss of "prime" is usually due to ingestion of air into the pump. The clearances and displacement ratios in pumps used for liquids and other more viscous fluids cannot displace the air due to its lower density. Pumps as public water supplies First European depiction of a piston pump, by Taccola, c.1450.One sort of pump once common worldwide was a hand-powered water pump, or 'pitcher pump'. It would be installed over a community water well that was used by people in the days before piped water supplies. In parts of the British Isles, it was often called "the parish pump". Although such community pumps are no longer common, the expression "parish pump" is still used. It derives from the kind of the chatter and conversation that might be heard as people congregated to draw water from the community water pump, and is now used to describe a place or forum where matter of purely local interest is discussed. Because water from pitcher pumps is drawn directly from the soil, it is more prone to contamination. If such water is not filtered and purified, consumption of it might lead to gastrointestinal or other water-borne diseases. Modern hand operated community pumps are considered the most sustainable low cost option for safe water supply in resource poor settings, often in rural areas in developing countries. A hand pump opens access to deeper groundwater that is often not polluted and also improves the safety of a well by protecting the water source from contaminated buckets. Pumps like the Afridev pump are designed to be cheap to build and install, and easy to maintain with simple parts. However, scarcity of spare parts for these type of pumps in some regions of Africa has diminished their utility for these areas. Sealing multiphase pumping applicationsMultiphase pumping applications, also referred to as tri-phase, have grown due to increased oil drilling activity. In addition, the economics of multiphase production is attractive to upstream operations as it leads to simpler, smaller in-field installations, reduced equipment costs and improved production rates. In essence, the multiphase pump can accommodate all fluid stream properties with one piece of equipment, which has a smaller footprint. Often, two smaller multiphase pumps are installed in series rather than having just one massive pump. For midstream and upstream operations, multiphase pumps can be located onshore or offshore and can be connected to single or multiple wellheads. Basically, multiphase pumps are used to transport the untreated flow stream produced from oil wells to downstream processes or gathering facilities. This means that the pump may handle a flow stream (well stream) from 100 percent gas to 100 percent liquid and every imaginable combination in between. The flow stream can also contain abrasives such as sand and dirt. Multiphase pumps are designed to operate under changing/fluctuating process conditions. Multiphase pumping also helps eliminate emissions of greenhouse gases as operators strive to minimize the flaring of gas and the venting of tanks where possible. Source: wikipedia