Numerical Analysis of Design and Off-Design Performance of High Specific Speed Mixed Flow Pumps

In most cases of high specific speed mixed flow pump applications, it is necessary to control off-design performance such as shutoff power/head and unstable characteristic as well as design point performance. The authors have been working on multi-objective optimization strategy of mixed flow pump design considering off-deign performance by means of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). In the design optimization process, it was found that the steady CFD analysis using one pitch blade passage adopting periodic boundary condition could be used for relative comparison of the important performance characteristics such as the level of efficiency, the shutoff performance and the stall characteristics of different designs. However, the steady CFD analysis with one pitch blade passage showed that absolute values of head and shaft power were estimated lower than those of the experimental results especially in the partial capacity range. In order to improve the accuracy of CFD results it should be necessary to use full pitch model. In this paper, the evaluation results of three CFD approaches on the capability of the performance prediction of the mixed flow pumps will be shown. The approaches evaluated are steady flow analysis with one pitch blade passage using periodic boundary conditions, full pitch steady flow analysis and unsteady flow analysis. It was found from the evaluation results that the full pitch steady flow analysis showed the same tendency as one pitch analysis and the unsteady CFD provided higher accuracy of the shutoff head. However, the steady analysis should still be useful to reduce the high computational cost and the amount of time. Meanwhile the unsteady analysis clarifies the details of the off-design flow patterns. The effects of the turbulence models and the details of the off-design flow patterns were also discussed in this paper.