Study on the Performance of Pump Using CFD Tool

In this paper, a numerical simulation of the three-dimensional fluid flow inside a centrifugal pump has been carried out. The pump has a three-vane commercial solid-handling impeller with 853 mm impeller outlet diameter, nominal flow of 0.559 m3/s and 50 m of head at the rotating speed 890 rpm. Because of the large clearance between the impeller and volute of a solids handling pump, their interaction has been neglected in the present study. The flow inside the rotating impeller is investigated without the stator volute to demonstrate the hydraulic performance of the impeller itself. The velocity and pressure distributions inside the impeller operating in the design and off-design conditions are presented. The numerical results of the overall performance attributes such as total differential head and efficiency through the impeller are compared with the test data. The governing equations including continuity, momentum, and turbulence equations are solved in the rotating frame to simulate the three-dimensional turbulent flow inside the impeller by using the commercial Computational Flow Dynamics (CFD) software STAR-CD. The turbulence is modeled by using the high Reynolds standard k-ε model.