Abstract
This paper presents the experiences of two pump manufacturers with numerical cavitation prediction methods available in commercial computational fluid dynamic software or in codes developed in‐house. The intention of the authors is to evaluate these methods and their capabilities in predicting the cavitating performance of pumps from an industrial point of view.In the first part of the article, benchmarks were set for three different commercial software packages on the basis of a comparison of measurements obtained for a centrifugal pump. In the second part, the results of a commercial code are compared, for different impellers, to those obtained with a simplified cavitation prediction code.The abilities and the benefits of the various approaches to cavitation prediction in the design process of a pump are discussed.
Highlights
This paper presents the experiences of two pump manufacturers with numerical cavitation prediction methods available in commercial computational fluid dynamic software or in codes developed in-house
In the first part of the article, benchmarks were set for three different commercial software packages on the basis of a comparison of measurements obtained for a centrifugal pump
Only few attempts to improve cavitation in pumps by using numerical approaches have been made. This optimization is limited to finer adaptation of vane inlet angles based on the predicted flow angles obtained from analysis of cavitation free flow computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and to improvement of the profiling of the vanes in order to limit the minimum pressure (Spring, 1992)
Summary
This paper presents the experiences of two pump manufacturers with numerical cavitation prediction methods available in commercial computational fluid dynamic software or in codes developed in-house. These methods have been only recently introduced in these codes and, there is a very small return of experience in the usage of such methods, especially in an industrial context (Combes and Archer, 2000; Visser, 2001) It is the purpose of this article to provide some information about the ability of these methods to predict cavitation in pumps and, in a provocative way, to compare their results to a simplified prediction method based on the postprocessing of a noncavitating flow calculation, corresponding to a noncoupled approach, supposing that the cavitation development does not affect the liquid flow. The reader is asked to refer to the manuals of these codes for more information
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