Hydrodynamic design of a centrifugal pump impeller

Abstract

The world of fluid machinery is vast and widespread having its wings in all aspects of life. From agriculture to air-conditioning, fluid machinery play an important role. A pump is a machine that expends mechanical energy to increase the pressure of a fluid and to move it from a region of low pressure to one of high pressure by creating pressure difference between the suction side and delivery side. Little information is known about the complex flow phenomenon taking place inside it, but its performance can be improved by optimizing various design parameters to produce a streamlined flow. Conventionally, many aspects of the design of an impeller are based on empirical formulae derived from experience and thumb rules. Therefore, studying these parameters mathematically will serve the purpose of increasing the efficiency and also establishing a standard methodology for designing the impeller. The main objective of the present work is to improve the performance of a centrifugal pump with improved design of its impeller by analyzing and optimizing the design parameters like vane profile, inlet and outlet vane angles, number of vanes and overall dimensions. In this work, design parameters of the impeller are selected over a range, which influences the performance of the pump. A unique solution is generally not obtained, different system designs may be generated for a given application. The design procedure is validated using standard computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. The fluent software used in this work simulates the performance of the pump virtually and shows the flow pattern. The present work establish theoretical and experimental methods for design and testing of a pump and these methods eliminate the laborious trial and error method, with multiple proto types to arrive the best design of a pump. newline newline newline