New concept of strainer for permanent installation

In order to protect interior part of expensive machineries, such as centrifugal compressors, strainers are installed in the suction line, to prevent premature equipment failure and consequent shutdown. They collect debris and foreign objects, left in the pipeline after its construction, flowing with the fluid. Strainers are defined temporary because they are used during the start-up phase. After the process has run successfully, the strainer is removed and cleaned. According to "Baker Hughes know how", the best practice is not to install them to avoid loss of compressor efficiency or even strainer potential failure. In the last years the demand of strainer for permanent installation is increased, mainly to reduce cost maintenance. For this reason, Baker Hughes company has investigated new solutions. In this thesis will be exposed a preliminary design of strainer for permanent installation: an "egg-shaped" geometry is implemented, characterized by a sandwich structure, in which the inner layer is composed of lattice structures whose role is to ensure filtering standards. New innovative manufacturing techniques are used for this project, in particular Additive Manufacturing (AM), with the Selective Laser Melting (SLM) method. The first part of this document analyses different configurations of lattice structures according to both experimental and computational approaches. They are, first of all, printed, in collaboration with Baker Hughes Additive Manufacturing Department, and tested, to understand better their permeability property. As a consequence, Computational Fluid Dynamic analysis has been done to match with experimental results. The second part of the document is related to the definition of the new geometry. The "egg shape" is investigated and simulated by leveraging the experimental-computational tuning, being then able to verify advantages and disadvantages vs. the conventional cone / double-cone shape in terms of overall length (geometry) and fluid dynamic pressure loss performance at full flow (impact on Compressor's efficiency). The experimental setup and data acquisition was possible thanks to the precious and relentless collaboration of University of Ferrara mechanical engineering department team (Nicola Zanini, Alessio Suman) under the supervision of the full professor Michele Pinelli.