Improvement In Design Of Centrifugal Slurry Pump Using CFD

Abstract

The present study on the improvement in design of centrifugal slurry pump was conducted at the Mechanical Engineering Department, Thapar University, Patiala. Centrifugal slurry pumps have been widely used for slurry transportation in thermal power plants, chemical process plants, sewage pumping etc. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has become more popular approach for designing and performance evaluation of such complex machines. In the present work numerical simulations for centrifugal slurry pump were performed in order to give design improvements to the existing design of the pump. Numerical simulations were performed using Eulerian model with CFD package, ANSYS Fluent 6.3.26. The geometry generation of the different designs of pump were done using Gambit 2.3.16. The turbulence in the liquid phase has been described using k-ε model. The multiphase physics has been described using mixture model. Visualization of previous results from numerical simulations on the same pump has been done in order to find drawbacks in design. Two regions, namely, cutwater region and volute tongue region, were found for the geometry improvement. Four different models were prepared by assigning the design improvements to these regions. Numerical analysis of these models was done to find the most suitable design. After, visualizing the numerical results and Head trends for these models, model with straight tongue and rounded cutwater was found to be the best design. Moreover, another design parameter: number of blades, was also considered to improve the design. Two new models with blade number 4 and 6 were produced and analyzed numerically with single phase. However, numerical results revealed that higher number of blades should also be considered to optimize the number of blades.