Measurements were made of the lateral hydrodynamic forces experienced by a centrifugal pump impeller performing circular whirl motions within several volute geometries. Experiments were conducted for various flow coefficients, Φ impeller rotating speeds or angular frequencies, ω, and the angular frequency of the whirl motion, Ω, was varied from zero to nearly synchronous (Ω=ω) and to nearly anti-synchronous (Ω=-ω). The lateral forces were decomposed into (i) time averaged lateral forces and (ii) hydrodynamic force matrices representing the variation of the lateral forces with position of the impeller center. No assumptions concerning the form of these matrices need to be made. The latter can be further decomposed according to the variation with whirl frequency, the result being "stiffness", "damping", and "fluid inertial" rotordynamic force matrices. It was found that these force matrices essentially consist of equal diagonal terms and skew-symmetric off-diagonal terms. One consequence of this is that during its whirl motion the impeller experiences forces acting normal and tangential to the locus of whirl. Data on these normal and tangential forces are presented; in particular it is shown that there exists a region of positive reduced whirl frequencies, Ω/ω, within which the hydrodynamic forces can be destabilizing with respect to whirl.
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