Influence of Impeller Design Parameters and Manufacturing Process on the Centrifugal Pump Energy Efficiency

Abstract

Impellers can be considered as an the most important part of a centrifugal pump that directly affects system durability and performance. Centrifugal pumps are widely used around the world to ease daily life, and industries in particular oil and gas sections. Design parameters such as geometry, and manufacturing process have prime importance to guarantee the pump efficiency.  Conventional manufacturing processes such as casting and milling in particular Computer Numerical Control (CNC) milling are still today widespread process to produce an impeller that generally are followed by other surface finishing methods. But complex geometries can not be easily produced by such processes, therefore advanced digital methods like additive manufacturing process (AM) newly are applied to improve efficiency in terms of materials scrap, time and operator costs.  As a result, the use of this technology can eventually be seen as the key to developing high-performance rotor components. Considering a complex impeller geometry, it poses remarkable challenges to the engineers in order to produce it with the best possible dimensional accuracy and surface quality, and to reduce manufacturing production times. impellers are composed of blades and a hub, to transform kinetic energy to hydraulic one. The vast number of scientific works have been devoted to be concentrated on efficient tool-path generation strategies or optimization of the milling strategies in respect to various indicators. This study is aimed to study the effects of geometrical parameters and additive manufacturing processes to improve centrifugal pump efficiency in particular in terms of energy saving. Experimental and numerical simulation have been revealed that AM processes are the most promised methods to be substituted by conventional processes. Topology optimization and selective laser melting were utilized to digitalize the process and examine in detail the contribution of influential parameters. The results provide evidence that optimum design of impeller caused reduction of energy consumption by 17%.