Analysis of Internal Flow and Wear Characteristics of Binary Mixture Particles in Centrifugal Pump Based on CFD-DEM

Abstract

Solid-liquid two-phase flow centrifugal pumps are widely used in many fields closely related to economic development, such as energy exploitation, and the petrochemical industry. Many scholars have studied the influence of solid particles with different parameters on the transportation performance of centrifugal pumps but have mainly focused on the study of low-concentration single-component particles, and the research on the transportation of high-concentration binary mixture particles in centrifugal pumps is insufficient. In this paper, two kinds of glass beads (0.4 mm and 2 mm) were mixed as a solid phase medium, representing small particles and large particles, respectively. The effects of a high concentration (Cv = 10%) of binary mixture particles on the transport and wear characteristics of a solid-liquid centrifugal pump were analyzed by simulation and experiment. Computational Fluid Dynamics-Discrete Element Method (CFD-DEM) and Archard wear model were used for simulation, realized by Fluent software and EDEM software. The results show that the large particles have a greater effect on the performance decline than the small particles, and the increase of the proportion of large particles has a greater effect on the efficiency decline than the head decline. The wear degree of the flow channel in the pump changes obviously with the particle ratio, and the overall wear is small when the particle ratio is 1:2.