As a most fundamental and necessary device to handle medium consistency (MC) pulp fiber suspension in pipeline systems, the development of MC-centrifugal pump is eagerly expected. The standard water pump or pumps for low consistency pulp are hardly capable of pumping the pulp fiber suspension having mass consistency C_m higher than 7%. The limitation is believed to be primarily the difficulty of feeding the pulp into the impeller and the effects of the contained air or other gases on the pump performance. In this paper, some experimental results are reported on a specially designed MC-centrifugal slurry pump, which successfully pumps up the MC-mixture of C_m ≈ 15% with stable delivery pressure. It is clearly shown that the MC-pump performance is greatly affected by the pump rotational speed, suction pressure of the vacuum pump and cavitation number. As expected, the effects of the consistency on the pump performance are limited in the region of C_m ≥ 10% for this kind of MC-pump.
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