You are told to purchase a pump for your manufacturing facility that will carry water to the top of a tower at your facility. The following is a pump sizing problem to illustrate the calculations in this article. Since the majority of the pumps used in the chemical process industries (CPI) are centrifugal pumps, this article focuses on that equipment category, rather than the other general classes of pumps, such as rotary and positive displacement pumps. The automated Excel spreadsheet assists in calculating the key parameters for pump sizing and selection. Along with this article, we have created a useful Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to assist with centrifugal pump sizing. This article aims to fill in some of the gaps in understanding and provide a straightforward method for pump sizing and selection.
Without a proper understanding of the pump selection process, engineers cannot effectively make both economic and practical decisions. This results in a higher lifecycle cost (see Example 1, below). There are situations in which purchasing a less expensive pump actually leads to greater energy-usage costs. The initial purchase price of a pump is only a small fraction of the total lifecycle cost. In industrial operations, pumping alone can account for between 25 and 50% of the total energy usage of the process, depending on the application. Chemical engineering literature does not fully cover other essential aspects of pump sizing and selection - including the viscosity correction, power consumption, commercial availability and lifecycle cost analysis. A number of recent articles provide useful guidelines for sizing and selecting pumps, but these articles focus on certain specific aspects of proper pump sizing, while leaving out others.
Many aspiring chemical engineers enter industry after university study without sufficient practical knowledge about how to properly size pumps. An automated spreadsheet method helps engineers take those factors into account in centrifugal pump selection Viscosity, power consumption, commercial availability and lifecycle cost analysis are all important considerations in pump sizing.
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