Research on the effect of wear-ring clearances to the performance of centrifugal pump

Abstract

In order to study the effect of wear-ring clearance on the performance of centrifugal pump, based on the Reynolds Time-Averaged N-S equations and RNG k- turbulence model, a centrifugal pump was simulated with three variable styles of the wear-rings: Only the clearance of the front wear-ring was changed, only the clearance of the back wear-ring was changed and both were changed. Numerical results agree well with the experimental results. In the three changing styles of the clearance, the variable of the clearance of front wear-ring has the most influence on the performance of centrifugal pump. The existence of wear-ring not only has an effect on the volumetric loss of the centrifugal pump, but also on the performance of the centrifugal pump. Relative to the experimental studies, numerical simulation methods have some advantages, such as low cost, fast and efficient, and easy to get the detailed structure of the internal flow characteristics, so it has been widely used in the fluid machinery study. In order to study the effect of wear-ring clearance on the performance of centrifugal pump, based on the Reynolds Time-Averaged N-S equations and RNG k- turbulence model, a centrifugal pump was simulated with three variable styles of the wear-rings: Only the clearance of the front wear-ring was changed, only the clearance of the back wear-ring was changed and both were changed. Numerical results agree well with the experimental results. In the three changing styles of the clearance, the variable of the clearance of front wear-ring has the most influence on the performance of centrifugal pump. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.