Abstract
Submersible pumps are now in high demand due to the sporadic occurrence of recent torrential rains. The current study was carried out to investigate the hydraulic characteristics of a submersible axial-flow pump with a swept impeller and to optimize the impeller and diffuser shapes of the pump to enhance the hydraulic performance. Three-dimensional Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations were solved with the shear stress transport turbulence model. The governing equations were discretized using the finite volume method, and unstructured tetrahedral and hexahedral meshes were used in the grid system. The optimal grid system was selected through a grid dependency test. A performance test for the submersible axial-flow pump was carried out experimentally, and the results of the numerical analysis were validated against the experimental results. The hydraulic efficiency and the total head were used as objective functions. For the first optimization, a multi-objective optimization was carried out to simultaneously improve the objective functions through a hybrid multi-objective evolutionary algorithm coupled with a response surface approximation by varying the swept angle and pitch angle of the blades of the rotating impeller. The second multi-objective optimization was performed using two design variables, i.e., the inlet angle and the length of the diffuser vanes, to simultaneously increase the objective functions. Clustered optimum designs in the Pareto optimal solutions yielded significant increases in the objective function values as compared with the reference design.
Highlights
Submersible axial-flow pumps have been used in Korea, since the early 1980s, for pumping out the water at drainage pumping stations
ToMulti-Objective simultaneously improve of the efficiency and the head of the submersible pump with the Impeller swept impeller, the hybrid multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) coupled with the response surface approximation (RSA) surrogate model was employed in the multiTo simultaneously improve the total efficiency and the head of the submersible pump with objective optimization procedure
The swept impeller, the hybrid MOEA coupled with the RSA surrogate model was employed in the 5 presents the definition of the sweep (θ) and pitch angles of the swept impeller
Summary
Submersible axial-flow pumps have been used in Korea, since the early 1980s, for pumping out the water at drainage pumping stations. Due to the frequent occurrence of torrential rain, the demand for equipping a higher capacity pump system has been steadily and significantly increasing. The system has been used in various applications, such as drainage pumping stations and irrigation water supply facilities. The submersible axial-flow pump is composed of a submersible motor, the inlet guide vanes (IGVs), a rotating impeller, and a diffuser. The design of axial-flow pumps considers the discharging flow rate and the head to determine the impeller rotational speed and the discharging diameter, and the best efficiency at the design point is taken into account to determine the power and the rotation speed of the motor. Submersible pumps used in drainage pumping stations operate for Energies 2020, 13, 3053; doi:10.3390/en13123053 www.mdpi.com/journal/energies
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