Influence of the gas compressibility in the pump cylinder on longitudinal oscillations of the rod string

The paper presents a model development related to the longitudinal oscillations of the rod string inthe deep-well pumping unit taking into account the compressibility of the gas-liquid mixture in the cylinder of the pump. The approach which uses the problem formulation in the form of quasi-variational inequalities was applied to solve this problem. The solution of this problem can be reduced to a sequence of non-smooth minimization problems. This approach is quite versatile and can be used for columns in highly deviated wells. In this model, the gas component of the mixture is subject to Boyle's law. This model does not consider the compressibility of the liquid components, the dilution of gas in a liquid and extraction of gas from the fluid. On the basis of the proposed model, we considered the influence of the gas content in the mixture which fills the pump cylinder on the dynagraph of the rod string in the upper section. Besides, different behaviors of the rod string in two cases are considered. In the first case the gas is uniformly distributed (but not dissolved) in a liquid which fills the pump cylinder. In the second case the gas fills a localized volume in the pump cylinder. If the gas is distributed in the pumped mixture, the dynagraph segments which correspond to the compression phase have a weaker inclination than the ones of the extension phase. It can be explained by the fact that the mass of the gas and, thus the compressibility of the mixture in the phase of compression is higher than the one in the extension phase. This fact also explains the weakening of free oscillations which is much more significant for that phase when the plunger moves down, rather than the phase when the plunger moves upward. If the gas occupies the localized volume in the pump cylinder, then it has the same shape both in the compression and extension phases. When the plunger moves downward, no excessive weakening of oscillations is found.