Abstract
Flow losses in common vanned pumps such as centrifugal pumps have been widely studied, while less research attention has been paid to side channel pumps that are commonly used in the food processing and petrochemical industries. Therefore, this study reveals the exact regions of high hydraulic losses for side channel pump models using the entropy loss production method. Numerical calculations based on unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) equations coupled with the shear stress transport (SST) k-ω turbulence model were used to acquire the entropy dissipative components of the flow. The accuracy of the numerical method was validated by comparing the experimental measurements of pump case 2 with a wrapping angle of 30°. The results showed that the impeller domain produced higher losses compared to the side channel. The impeller generally recorded the highest loss coefficient of ζD' at 144 whiles the side channel recorded the lowest at ζD' < 6. The high entropy losses in the impeller domain are mainly associated with the irregular velocity fields. Furthermore, the losses visualized at the inner radius of the impeller are higher than the outer radius in all pump cases. The inner radius of all the impeller passage of all pump cases revealed higher loss coefficient (ζD' > 0.2) compared to the outer radius and decreased gently with increasing flows. Notwithstanding, the high losses produced in all pump cases, case 1 produced the highest energy losses compared with the other pump cases even though it had the best hydraulic performance. Thus, this study contributes to the fundamental knowledge of side channel pumps by providing the regions of high-energy losses for further optimization of the main geometrical parts especially the impeller. This will subsequently help improve the performance and operational reliability of side channel pumps and enhance its applications.
Published Version
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