Investigation of effects of scale and surface roughness on efficiency of water jet pumps using CFD

Abstract

Comparing to pumps with moving parts water-jet pumps have a lower efficiency and surface roughness is an important factor for these types of pumps. The aim of this simulation study is to numerically determine how the scaling-up, downscaling and change in the absolute and relative roughness would impact on the energy efficiency of the pumps, using a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver ANSYS FLUENT. In order to select the turbulence model that produces the predictions closest to the actual data from four turbulence models, a preliminary study was conducted on a full-scale jet pump. Using the transition SST model, which gives the best results among all the models, the effects of scale and roughness on the performance of the pumps were investigated in the scale range from 1/4 to 20/1. The optimum efficiencies for different area ratios over a wide range were determined according to the scale and size of roughness. It was seen that the efficiency increases significantly up to a given scale size at a constant absolute roughness, while it is generally independent of the scale size at constant relative roughness. The relative efficiency for the area ratio 5.92 reduces to 60% at the relative roughness value of 0.05. Moreover, CFD appears to be the most appropriate tool for model studies of jet pumps.