Influences of wear-ring clearance leakage on performance of a small-scale pump-turbine

Abstract

Wear-ring clearance leakage would affect performance of pump-turbine significantly. In this paper, the variation of the leakage and efficiency of flat ring seal and labyrinth seal are numerically studied on one pump-turbine when the width of clearance is 0.2 mm and 0.5 mm. The result shows that the effect of leakage flow cannot be neglected. The pump-turbine performance affected by leakage in turbine mode is more than that in pump mode at the same sealing structure and width of clearance. Each component’s proportion of total pressure loss hardly varies with flow rate at pump mode, which is opposite to that at turbine mode. Leakage does not change proportionally with system flow rate. When the width of clearance decreases to 0.2 mm, the leakage is reduced obviously because the maximum entropy occurs in the front pump chamber. The mixing of leakage flow and mainstream at impeller inlet at pump mode will increase the total pressure and decrease the flow angle and relative flow angle. Finally, it reduces the impeller’s work capacity.