PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION OF CENTRIFUGAL PUMP HANDLING VISCOUS OIL BY MODIFICATION OF IMPELLER GEOMETRY

摘要

In the present research, by using the modification in some of geometrical parameters, the performance of viscous fluid centrifugal pumps has been improved. In other words, the effects of the inlet and outlet blade angles and passage width have been investigated. Numerical simulation of three-dimensional flow is carried out by an extended computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code. " k-ω SST", was chosen as the turbulence model and a high-resolution algorithm was used to solve the governing equations. The numerical results of impeller primary geometry have good compliance with the experimental ones. Through variations of these three characteristics, 18 different cases simultaneously were investigated. Analysis of the obtained results shows the efficiency and head of pump increase by reduction of the inlet blade angle and changes in the outlet blade angle and passage width. It is clear that with a 38.2 and 17.5 deg angle of the inlet and outlet blade, respectively, and a passage width of 21 mm, the head values and pump efficiency are optimized between the 18 cases.