PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION OF RADIAL FLOW CENTRIFUGAL PUMP IMPELLER USING CFD

Karun Mendiratta, Krishna Kumar Yadav, V K Gahlot

Abstract: This work aims to analyze the hydraulic performance and characteristics of a centrifugal pump using ANSYS CFX (ver.14.0). A centrifugal radial flow pump has been designed to deliver 0.0074 m3 /s of water with a head of 30 m running at a speed of 2870 rpm. The pump unit has been modeled using PTC Creo (ver. 2.0). Computation fluid dynamics (CFD) has been used to analyze the flow characteristics. The performance of the pump was first determined using the existing thickness of blade and then, the thickness of blades has been varied to analyze the pump’s performance. The results show that for an initial 10mm blade thickness, the efficiency of the pump was 82.98%. However, the efficiency of pump increased by 1.87% for the optimized 5mm blade.

Keywords: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Analysis, Radial Flow Pump, Blade thickness, Overall Efficiency

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2016.0511025