CAVITATION ANALYSIS IN A CENTRIFUGAL PUMP USING VOF METHOD

Title & Authors
CAVITATION ANALYSIS IN A CENTRIFUGAL PUMP USING VOF METHOD
Lee, W.J.; Lee, J.H.; Hur, N.; Yoon, I.S.;

Abstract
Centrifugal pumps consume considerable amount of energy in various industrial applications. Therefore, improvement of the efficiency of these machines has become a major challenge. Cavitation is a phenomenon which decreases the pump efficiency and even causes structural demage. Hence, the goal of this paper is to investigate the cavitation problem in the single-stage and double-stage centrifugal pumps. The Volume of Fraction (VOF) method has been used for the numerical simulations together with Rayliegh-Plesset model for the gas-liquid two-phase flow inside the pump. In order to capture the turbulent phenomena, the standard k-$\small{{\varepsilon}}$ turbulence model has been adopted, and the simulations have been done as unsteady cases. In addition, the motion of the rotating parts has been simulated using Multi Reference Frame(MRF) method. The results are presented and compared in terms of hydraulic head and NPSH for both the single-stage and double-stage pumps. The H-Q curves show the effects of cavitation on decreasing the pumps performances.
Keywords
Centrifugal pump;Cavitation;CFD(Computational Fluid Dynamic);VOF(Volume of Fraction);
Language
English
Cited by
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