Optimal hydraulic design to minimize erosive wear in a centrifugal slurry pump impeller

Abstract

Centrifugal slurry pumps are commonly used to convey solid materials in many industries including the mining, power, and marine industries. The solid particles in the slurry frequently impact the pump inner wall resulting in significant wear of the flow passage. Frequent replacement of the pump components is not only expensive, but also wastes manpower and time. Therefore, many studies have sought to find optimal designs of slurry pumps that are efficient and have less wear. This study used Eulerian-Eulerian mixture model to simulate the solid–liquid two-phase flow of quartz sand and water in a slurry pump. The impeller was optimized statistically. Then, the original pump design and the optimized pump design were manufactured for a geometric similarity ratio of 1:0.408. The wear rates in the two slurry pumps were then measured by weight loss measurements. The tests show that the optimized pump has less wear, longer service life and meets the design goals which shows that this optimization method is effective.