Influence of Weak Compressibility on the Hydrodynamic Performance Evaluation of Pump Turbines in the Pump Mode

Abstract

In general, weak compressibility is one of the properties of liquids. That is, in actual operation of hydraulic machinery, the flow is weakly compressible. However, the influence of weak compressibility is often neglected in usual numerical simulation, which makes the simulation results different from the experimental results. Based on the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solver and model test rig, by means of mutual verification between numerical simulation and experiment, the fitting degree between numerical results and experimental results before and after considering weak compressibility is compared and analyzed in this paper; it is obtained that the numerical results is closer to the experimental results after considering the weak compressibility. In addition, velocity field of pump turbines, head loss of main components, and the change of entropy yield are analyzed and reasons for numerical value being closer to the experimental value after considering weak compressibility of fluid are summarized and analyzed. It is proved that the consideration of weak compressibility is of great significance to improve the accuracy of results in the numerical simulation of pump turbines.