The automobile fuel pump studied in this paper is a mini regenerative pump consisting of a casing with an axial channel and an impeller with 33 radial blades. In this study, the pressure fluctuation characteristics of the regenerative pump were analyzed with the method of unsteady CFD analysis. To investigate the pressure fluctuation, the unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations (URANS) were solved with realizable k-e turbulence model using the CFD code FLUENT. To study the effect of arc length of stripper on the pressure fluctuation, the pressure fluctuations at several locations of pumps with strippers of different arc length were analyzed in time and frequency domain. The static pressure contours at different times were presented to reveal the generating mechanism of pressure fluctuation of the regenerative pump. For the purpose of pressure fluctuation reduction, a random modulation of blade spacing method was applied to design a new impeller with uneven spaced blades. The pressure fluctuations of four different pump units of the combination of different blade distribution impellers with casings of different arc length of stripper were studied and discussed. The pressure fluctuation of the pump unit of combination of random blade distribution impeller and large arc length stripper is significantly reduced. In this paper, the generating mechanism of pressure fluctuation for regenerative pump is uncovered, and a good solution to the fundamental pressure fluctuation reduction of regenerative pump is put forward.
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