Experimental assessment of the impact of number of stages on vertical axis multi-stage centrifugal PATs

Abstract The pursuit of Best Management Practices (BMPs) for pressurized water systems has intensified interest in Pumps As Turbines (PATs), given that PAT use enables coupling of pressure regulation with small-scale hydropower generation. Installing PATs instead of micro-turbines provides for several advantages, such as cheaper procurement and maintenance costs, and importantly, the ability to select the most reliable model from among a wide variety of devices available in the market. Nevertheless, the current state of knowledge regarding PAT performance leaves out critical aspects that remain to be adequately addressed, especially for some models, such as centrifugal vertical axis multi-stage pumps running in reverse mode, despite such devices having attractive features that offer particularly advantageous benefits when high head in the system is exploitable. In contributing key experimental findings on four vertical multi-stage (single-, two-, three-, and four-stage) PATs, this paper thus extends the performance related knowledge about vertical multi-stage PATs: prior models from the literature are demonstrated to reliably predict performance, with the contribution additionally consisting in assessing performance dependence on number of pump stages. The results showed both head and power to be highly correlated with the variable number of stages, especially for predicting PAT characteristics at the Best Efficiency Point (BEP) for multi-stage models. However, the single-stage model exhibited slightly lower performance values.