Research on Improving Cavitation Performance of High Temperature Vacuum Tower Bottom Pump

In petrochemical industry the working environment of vacuum tower bottom pump is harsh and its cavitation requirement is high. In view of this problem, we optimally designed two kinds of impeller. With well designed suction chamber and volute, two groups of hydraulic model were assembled. The 3d models were made in PROE; the flow field was meshed in the pre-processing module ICEM-CFD of CFX; then CFX was used to calculate flows under three discharges in two phase motion patterns of the two hydraulic models, and also cavitation was predicted. The simulation results show that the first hydraulic model is better than the second, so the first hydraulic model was made into full mold and also test was done. The simulation results and test results are contrasted: at Q = 406m³/h, the predicted critical NPSH is 3.74m, while the test critical NPSH is 4.02m, which meet the design commands and the deviation is not large. This shows that CFD technology is helpful on performance prediction in engineering. This research provides a theoretical guidance for study on improving cavitation performance of vacuum tower bottom pump.