Energetic, structural, thermal and fatigue analysis of heavy duty process pumps

Abstract

Design of heavy duty process pumps usually based on the end user requirements. Operating conditions of pumps in the system dictate technical solution to reach high performance pump design. Pumps for special application like nuclear power plants, petroleum, petrochemical and natural gas industry should reach very high design criteria and have to fulfil requirements of different international standards for pumps. Usually energetic and cavitation characteristics are necessary issues of the development procedure. In this paper structural analysis that include thermo-mechanical loading and fatigue phenomena are also considered, because they are very important for estimation of long service life. Repeated thermomechanical loading and unloading which leads to fatigue of pumps are obtained using unsteady Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) with taking into account also thermodynamics equations. Complete numerical analysis is done for an example of centrifugal pump with the specific speed around nq=24. The results show energetic characteristics, thermal stresses and deformations and maximal number of operation cycles for safe and reliable operation.