A numerical study of an external gear pump operating under different conditions

Abstract

In this work, Computational Fluid Dynamics (C.F.D) analysis has been done using a commercial CFD solver FLUENT-6.2 to simulate the fluid flow in rotary pumps of positive displacement type, utilising an external gear pump as an illustration. The 3-D model of the fluid flow volume around the casing and gear teeth is created to represent the computational domain for analysis. To anticipate pump performance, a three-dimensional CFD approach was devised and deployed in terms of pressure field, velocity vectors, and the flow pattern to understand pump flow. The primary goal of this research is to examine how the number of teeth affects how a gear pump operates and to show the pressure profile in each intermittent teeth gap. It is observed increase in speed of gears increases the mass flow rate of the pump whereas the increase of the number of teeth keeping same pitch circle diagram, decreases the mass flow rate of the pump. The results found, gives a clear picture of the pressure rise across the teeth annulus of the pump. Therefore, another goal of this work is to predict the performance of the pump virtually and to verify with the analytical result of the pump with numerical result to establish the validation the model.