Abstract
Side channel pumps are important machines for handling toxic, explosive or other dangerous liquids in various engineering processes. However, the operational reliability of these pumps is directly affected by the intensity of the pressure and velocity fluctuations, thus the flow fluctuations existing within the pump cannot be neglected because of their direct influence on the noise, vibration and harshness performance. Therefore, describing precisely the zones of highly unsteady and turbulent flow fields is a key research topic. Moreover, the size of the wrapping angle strongly affects the levels of pressure and velocity fluctuations, thus numerical calculations of the pressure and velocity fluctuation intensities in side channel pump models with different wrapping angles were conducted in this work. The results indicated that the pressure fluctuation coefficient increased gradually from the inflow to the outflow. At the interrupter, the flow experienced the most irregular flow patterns in the pump. The flow at the inflow region in both the impeller and side channel passage rendered weak pressure fluctuation intensities. All three pump cases operated with 24 blades but after one complete circulatory cycle, cases 1, 2 and 3 revealed 21, 20 and 19 regular pressure fluctuations respectively in the impeller flow passage. On the other hand, the side channel flow passage rather produced 24 regular pressure fluctuations. Furthermore, the main frequency harmonic excitations for all studied monitoring points in the impeller and side channel flow passages of the three pump cases occurred at 600 Hz (24 × fn), 1200 Hz (48 × fn), and 1800 Hz (72 × fn). For this reason, exchanged flow times between the impeller and side channel is mainly responsible for the pressure fluctuation which subsequently affects the noise and vibration generation in the side channel pump. Hence, the results could be used as a reference for Noise-Vibration-Harshness (NVH) study in turbomachinery especially modifying the side channel pump in order to improve the operational reliabilities for many engineering processes.
Highlights
A side channel pump is a kind of small sized regenerative pump with low flow rate but high head.Most side channel pumps can handle toxic, explosive or other dangerous liquids, guaranteeing a high level of safety in various chemical engineering processes
Unsteady flow fields mainly pressure and velocity fluctuations have been studied in details numerically by considering three different wrapping angles 15◦, 30◦ and 45◦ of side channel pump models
The flow fluctuations monitored at some specific locations in the three pump cases demonstrate interesting results
Summary
A side channel pump is a kind of small sized regenerative pump with low flow rate but high head. The operation of this pump experiences vortex and turbulent flows as a result of unsteady pressure and velocity fluctuations. The effects of blade angle on the hydraulic performance characteristics of a regenerative pump were studied by Choi et al [18]. The above studies on side channel pumps concentrated on hydraulic performance rather than unsteady flow fluctuations. Pei et al [24] predicted the hydraulic performance of a side channel pump model using three different wrapping angles. The pump model with the smallest wrapping angle predicted the highest performance at all operating conditions. The numerical results are further analyzed using statistical methods to delineate the unsteady flow fields within side channel pump models with different wrapping angles.
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