Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
School of Mechanical Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tabriz University, Tabriz, Iran
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 17 July 2011
Received in revised form 30 November 2011
Accepted 27 February 2012
Available online 7 March 2012
Keywords:
CFD
Turbulence modeling
Hydraulic oil
Centrifugal pump
Geometry
a b s t r a c t
The performance of centrifugal pumps drops sharply during the pumping of viscous uids. Changing
some geometric characteristics of the impeller in these types of pumps improve their performance. In this
investigation, the 3-D ow in centrifugal pump along with the volute has been numerically simulated.
This numerical solution has been carried out for different cases of primary geometry, and for the changes
made to the outlet angle and passage width of the impeller, and also for simultaneous modications of
these parameters. The nite volume method has been used for the discretization of the governing equations, and the High Resolution algorithm has been employed to solve the equations. Also, the k x SST
has been adopted as the turbulence model in the simulation. In the steady state, this simulation is dened
by means of the multi-reference frame technique, in which the impeller is situated in the rotating reference frame, and the volute is in the xed reference frame, and they are related to each other through the
Frozen Rotor. The obtained numerical results are compared with the experimental ones, and the outcome shows acceptable agreement between the two. The ow analysis indicates that with the modication of the original geometry of the pump, at the 30 outlet angle and the passage width of 21 mm, the
pump head and efciency increases compared to the other cases; this improvement is due the reduction
of losses arising from the generation of eddies in the passage and outlet of the impeller.
2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Due to the large complexity of ow and geometry in the radial
ow pumps, there are still many unknown issues associated with
the complete ow pattern in these pumps, which need to be
investigated. Moreover, the conduction of experimental studies
on samples with different volute and impeller geometries is
time-consuming and costly, and because of the complicated geometry, it is not possible to carry out a thorough investigation of the
ow eld for a vast number of operating conditions. Therefore,
the numerical ow analysis has recently become an appropriate
method of investigation of the ow patterns and losses.
Based on the main pioneering researches on the centrifugal
pump handling viscous uid (since 1926), the performance as a
function of oil viscosity was investigated, and the obtained results
were used for the design and selection of these pumps [14]. Today, because of drastic changes in the design and structure of newer models of hydraulic pumps, the previously obtained results on
older models cannot be used with high condence.
Li [510] investigated the effects of uids viscosity on the
performance of centrifugal oil pumps experimentally and
Corresponding author. Tel.: +98 2177240360.
E-mail address: Tahani@iust.ac.ir (M. Tahani).
0045-7930/$ - see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compuid.2012.02.028
62
Nomenclature
b2
BEP
CFD
DH
g
H
k
MRF
OL
P
Pd
Ps
PL
Q
r
RNG
S
SDUSs
SST
t
u
V
altitude (m)
Greek symbols
b2
outlet angle of blade(degree)
q
density of the uid (kg/m3)
l
viscosity (Pa s)
lt
eddy viscosity (Pa s)
t
kinematic viscosity (mm2/s)
X
rotational speed (rpm)
s
stress tensor
g
efciency (%)
Subscripts and superscripts
Avg
average
d
discharge
elect
electrical
i, j
components
in
inlet
out
outlet
s
suction
t
total
time-averaged value
ical results are compared with the experimental ones, and acceptable correlation is found between the two sets of results.
Numerically solving the complete 3-D geometry of the centrifugal pump, offering an impeller for improving the efciency, simulating and comparing various possible geometries, and plotting of
Static pressure contours and velocity vectors inside the pump are
some of the signicant features of this article.
2. Geometry of the centrifugal pump and the generation of
mesh
In this report, for the numerical investigation of the ow eld of
centrifugal pump, the geometry of the pump model: 65200 (made
by the Pump Iran Co.) is used. This centrifugal pump has single axial suction and vane less volute casing; equipped with an impeller
of 209 mm in outside diameter and six backwards curved blades.
The blade outlet and wrapping angles of the impeller are 27.5
and 140 respectively. The shroud of the impeller made of metal
is machined. The roughness of the impeller and volute is 100 lm.
The pump tested is driven by a three-phase AC electric motor,
whose rated power is 5.5 kW and speed is 1450 rpm. First, the initial geometry of this centrifugal pump (which has been designed
for the pumping of water) is simulated by using the available technical specications. In the next steps, in order to analyze the effect
of changing the uid viscosity, the outlet angle and the ow passage width are modied. In this analysis, the denition of geometry
covers the three pump sections of volute, impeller, and outlet pipe,
which are connected together for the analysis of the whole pump
(Fig. 1).
Then, in the mesh generation part of this code, mesh conguration is produced based on the type of physics that is considered for
the problem. For better conformity of the geometry with the computational domain, at the near-wall regions, the structured mesh is
used for the boundary layer, and at regions away from the wall, the
unstructured mesh conguration is employed to correctly cover
the complex geometry. For producing the unstructured mesh conguration, six-sided, pyramid, and wedge-shaped elements are
used in appropriate situations, which are shown in Fig. 1.
63
Fig. 1. General view of the centrifugal pump model and the mesh conguration used for ow analysis.
values or the time-averaging approach; however, the most common method of modeling turbulent ows is the time-averaging
method. Using this approach for the case of incompressible ows,
the general forms of the governing equations could be expressed as
relations (1)(4). In these equations, the effect of terms resulting
from ow rotation, including the Coriolis and centrifugal forces
can be modeled by adding the source term to the equations of
momentum.
Since the pumped uid is incompressible and the ow is in a
steady state, the continuity equation has the following form:
@ui
0
@xj
@
@P
@
qui uj
where the source term (including the centrifugal and Coriolis force
terms) is written as Eq. (3) and the average shear stress is obtained
from relation (4):
In Figs. 2 and 3, the geometry of the impeller and the outlet angle of blades have been shown, respectively. It can be observed that
the changes made to the blade are applied on the outlet angle b2.
As is clear from these gures, the passage width of the impeller
can be modied on the meridian plane; and the changes applied
to the original geometry with the outlet angle of 27.5 and passage
width of 17 mm are outlined in Table 1. To increase the passage
width, the distance between the front and back plates in the
meridian plane are increased. It should be mentioned that the applied change in the outlet angle of the blade is not accompanied by
any change in its inlet angle.
In the averaging of steady-state incompressible ows, the conservation equations can be solved based on the average Reynolds
! ! !
! !
Sui q2 X u X X r
sij l
@ui @uj
@xj @xi
3
4
64
uated with high precision using the k x model and the SST function, and the obtained results enjoy better accuracy than those of
the k e model; therefore, the SST turbulence model is used for
the numerical investigation of ow inside the centrifugal pump.
Table 1
Specications of the modied geometry.
Passage width
of Impeller(b2) (mm)
17
21
27.5
27.5
30
30
32.5
32.5
steady, and unsteady. If the volute has xed blades (diffuser), because of the alternating motion of blades and the confrontation between the impeller and diffuser blades, the ow is of the unsteady
type, relative to the xed external reference frame. However, when
the diffuser doesnt have xed blades, the ow can be studied in a
steady state by dening a rotating reference frame.
This simulation is dened by means of the multi-reference
frame technique, in which the impeller is situated in the rotating
reference frame, and the volute is in the xed reference frame,
and they are related to each other through the Frozen Rotor.
The frozen rotor method employs a quasi-steady algorithm, where
the rotor and stator are modeled at a xed (frozen) position relative to each other. Rotational terms are included in the moving
frames, but transient effects are neglected. This provides an efcient method for the calculation of interactions between impellers
and casings (volutes), and is also a viable option for compact machines with small distances between rotor and stator. In this way
the solution provides a snapshot of the ow regime [22].
When the NavierStokes equations of motion are solved in a
rotating reference frame, the uid acceleration appears as an additional term in the momentum equations, which was shown in relation (3).
2.4. Turbulence model
With the help of the mixing function value, the SST model automatically uses the k x model in the near-wall regions and the
k e model in the regions away from the wall. This model rst
modies the energy production term in the kinetic energy transfer
equation [23,24].
Considering the studies conducted on the two models of k e
and RNG k e, it is concluded that the near-wall ow can be eval-
@
@t
q dv
v
Z
s
qui dnj 0
65
Fig. 4. Typical mesh element with nodes (n1, n2 and n3) and integration points (ip1, ip2 and ip3).
@
@t
qui dv
quj ui dnj
s
P dni
@
@t
qu dv
Z
s
Z
@ui @uj
dnj Sui dv
@xj @xi
v
quj u dnj
s
Z
@u
dnj
C
@xj
s
Z
@ui @uj
dnj Su dv
@xj @xi
v
qV
qV
qV
q q
Dt
X
quj Dnj ip 0
X
ui ui
_ ip uj ip
m
Dt
ip
X
X @ui @uj
PDni ip
l
Dnj
Su i V
@xj @xi
ip
ip
ip
u u
Dt
ip
X
ip
_ ip uip
m
X @u
C
Dnj
Su V
@xj
ip
ip
10
11
The diffusion terms are estimated with the help of the weight
functions of the nite element method, and in the momentum
equations, the surface integral of the pressure gradient terms is
determined at the integration points. The advection terms are analyzed by the Skew Upwind Differencing Schemes (SUDSs) method,
which in this approach, the advection terms are in the streamwise
direction.
In the segregated solution strategy, the momentum equation is
solved by using an initial solution for pressure, and then a relation
is obtained for pressure modication. Because the guess correct
scheme is a linear system, a large number of iterations together
with relaxation coefcients are needed for the variables.
66
Table 2
Evaluation of the dependency of mesh and summary of CPU time for original impeller.
Element
number
Mean differences of
circumferential
velocities values (m/s)
628146
1045668
1842482
2173604
3277226
197.983
186.274
180.169
178.888
178.261
0.226
0.304
0.371
0.398
0.402
14.8
25.1
47.4
58.3
90.4
As the numbers in the above table demonstrate, at 3277226 elements, the output pressure does not change much. The number of
mesh elements includes the sum of elements in the impeller, volute, and the outlet pipe.
2.8. Summary of experimental setup
A centrifugal pump test setup, shown in Fig. 5, was used to compare the impeller geometries effects on the performance of centrifugal pump.
The pipe of the rig was made of stainless steel with inner diameter of 80 mm. The tank net volume was 2400 l. The operation condition was controlled by a gate valve on the discharge pipe. A digital
pressure transmitter gage was used at the pump inlet and outlet
pipes to measure the inlet and outlet pressures accurately. Bafe
plates were used for damping the disturbance of discharged uid.
Fig. 6. Centrifugal pump performance diagrams at different working conditions for original Impeller geometry.
67
The following parameters were measured under steady conditions to draw the main performance diagrams.
The pump head at all stages was computed using Bernoulli
equation:
g
Ps
V 21
2g
Z1 H
Pd
V 22
2g
Z 2 Hl
12
For the same inlet and outlet pipe diameter and velocity
(V1 = V2):
Pout;pump
cQH
;
Pin;pump
Pin;pump
14
Pd Ps
Z 2 Z 1 Hl
13
68
Fig. 9. Variations of efciency vs. ow rate for different uids and impeller geometries.
Fig. 10. Static pressure contours for impellers at BEP at 50% span.
on the discs including the wheel in the case of oil increases the
absorption power compared with the case of water.
Based on these results, at the best efciency points (that located
at QBEP(water) = 47.3 and QBEP(oil) = 48.2 m3/h) the efciency and
head values decrease about 20.5% and 1.4 m respectively, and the
power consumption increases about 1.03 kW during the pumping
of oil. The mentioned factors result in a remarkable reduction in
the performance.
3.2. The numerical head-ow rate (HQ) curve
For obtaining the HQ curves of centrifugal pumps in the cases
of steady state, turbulent ows and incompressible uids, the
amounts of total pressure at the entrance and exit of the simulated
geometry (such as experimental test points) are determined, and
by using relation (15), the pump head is calculated:
Pt2 Pt1
qg
15
69
b2 = 30 and b2 = 21 mm. Even with this few numbers of experiments, the numerical simulation can be veried for other impeller
blade angles and uid types, and the obtained results can be accepted without further experimentation.
Fig. 8 shows the comparison between the numerical and experimental HQ results during the pumping of water and oil by the
centrifugal pump. Comparing the experimental and numerical
values of head show that the average difference percentage in
the different cases (27.517 mm-water), (30.021 mm-oil),
(32.517 mm-oil) and (27.517 mm-oil) was 4.06%, 3.35%,
4.08% and 4% respectively. According to this gure, the numerical
and experimental results show satisfactory correlation.
3.3. The efciency-ow rate (gQ) curve
Fig. 9 shows the variations of efciency with the ow rate for
water and oil. It was depicted that increasing the outlet angle in
PL performance condition increases the efciency more than
increasing the passage width. The Results shown in this gure reveal that by improving the impeller geometry (outlet blade angle
of 30 and impeller passage width of 21 mm), the increment
magnitude of efciency around the BEP and OL operating conditions was 7.93% for mentioned viscous uid.
3.4. Static pressure contours and velocity vectors on the blade-to-blade
plane
When the centrifugal pump is pumping a highly viscous uid,
due to the increase of hydraulic losses and skin friction, the pump
70
The static pressure contours for impellers at BEP show that the
pressure increases gradually along streamwise direction within
impeller blade-to-blade passage and has higher pressure on
pressure surface than suction surface for each conguration. It
is demonstrated that the average of pressure in the outlet area
of impeller (b2 = 30 and b2 = 21 mm) is higher than the others.
Velocity vectors for impellers at BEP show that in the improved
impeller, the width of wake at the outlet of impeller and the
hydraulic losses decrease, these phenomena cause the improvement of centrifugal pump performance when handling viscous
uids.
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