NUMERICAL STUDY OF FLOW IN SIDE CHAMBERS OF A CENTRIFUGAL PUMP AND ITS EFFECT ON DISK FRICTION LOSS

Centrifugal pumps are ubiquitous in industry. Huge attempts for loss reduction in this gamut of instruments have been made; however, due to complexity of fluid flow in Turbomachinery, most previous works were confined to experimental works. In this paper we try to elucidate the flow in a real pump side chambers with the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics. A real pump chamber has been modeled and a high quality mesh has been developed, thus the modeling error has been reduced. Navier-Stokes equations have been solved for this domain. In order to predict the turbulence effects the SST model has been employed. This model has shown its capability in capturing physical phenomena occurring in swirling flows. The influence of three different parameters, namely pre-rotation, leakage and viscosity, on disk friction has been investigated. The latter is especially important when the pump is subjected to different temperatures. Keywords—Numerical Study, Centrifugal pumps, Disk friction loss