CFD ANALYSIS AND MODIFICATION OF OPEN WELL CENTRIFUGAL PUMP : A REVIEW
Keywords:
CFD, Centrifugal pump, review, flow analysis, paper.Abstract
The centrifugal pump is the most used pump type in the world. The flow analysis inside the
centrifugal pump is highly complex mainly due to 3D flow structure involving turbulence, secondary
flow, cavitation and unsteadiness. In recent years, a growing availability of computational resources
and progress in the accuracy of numerical methods brought turbo machinery Computational Fluid
Dynamics (CFD) methods from pure research work into the competitive industrial markets. The
critical review of CFD analysis of centrifugal pumps along with the future scopes for further
improvement is presented in this paper. CFD technique has been applied by the researchers to carry
out different investigations on centrifugal pumps viz. performance prediction at design and off-design
conditions, parametric study, cavitation analysis, diffuser pump analysis, performance of pump
running in turbine mode etc. Unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations together with two
equation k-ε turbulence model were found to be appropriate for CFD analysis of centrifugal pump.
Volute flow study and impeller-volute interaction appeared as an interesting research fields for the
further improvement in the pump performance. The most active areas of research and development are
the analysis of two phase flow, pump handling non-Newtonian fluids and fluid–structure interaction.