Choice of a turbulence model for pump intakes

Abstract

This article is focused on the choice of a suitable turbulence model for simulations of an industrial pump's intake, from the perspective of accuracy and, partially, also the CPU time. Twelve steady-state and transient simulations were made on a fine computational mesh, using turbulence models such as: the shear stress transport (SST), the scale-adaptive simulation (SAS), the Reynolds stress model, the explicit algebraic Reynolds-stress model, the detached eddy simulation and the large eddy simulation (LES). The curvature-correction (CC) option was assessed for the SST and SAS turbulence models. The results were compared with the LES and with published experimental results. Although all the models could predict the main floor vortex, there were still some substantial differences. It can be able to conclude that it is better to use either the SST-CC turbulence model, due to its low-computational resources and far better results than the SST model, or the SAS-CC turbulence model, since its predictions are quite similar to the LES results. In the final step, good agreement with experimental results was shown for a longer simulation with the SAS-CC turbulence model.