PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION OF RADIAL FLOW CENTRIFUGAL PUMP IMPELLER USING CFD

Abstract

Centrifugal pumps are widely used hydraulic machines, irrespective of the fact that their performance is generally not very good. So, turning them into more efficient machines is quite a challenge. The performance of a centrifugal pump is highly dependent on its geometrical parameters and its vane profile. In order to analyze the flow through complex systems like centrifugal pumps, Computation fluid dynamics (CFD) has been used. This work aims to study the performance analysis of a centrifugal mixed flow pump designed to deliver 0.25 m 3 /s of water with a head of 20 m at a speed of 1450 rpm using ANSYS CFX (ver.14.0). PTC Creo (ver. 2.0) has been used to model the pump unit. The performance of the pump was first determined using the existing vane angles and thickness of the blade then, the inlet vane angle, the outlet vane angle along with the thickness of the blade has been varied to analyze the pump's performance. The results show that for an initial inlet angle 21.08˚, outlet angle 16.28ånd blade thickness as 10mm, the efficiency of the pump was 84%. However, the efficiency of pump rises to 89.19% for the optimized angles and blade thickness.