Performance improvement of the sanitary centrifugal pump through an integrated approach based on response surface methodology, multi-objective optimization and CFD

Abstract

Performance improvement of the pumps leads to the reduction in power consumption of industrial pumping systems. This paper presents an effective approach for the enhancement of the performance of a sanitary centrifugal pump by adopting computational fluid dynamics and response surface methodology with a multi-objective optimization algorithm. An experimental apparatus with a closed loop is set up in laboratory to measure the pump performance and then to valid it with the numerical results. In this study, three input design parameters, namely blade outlet angle, blade wrap angle and blade outlet width, are investigated for the simultaneous optimization of pump head and efficiency. Twenty-five samples of impeller are generated with the help of the Latin hypercube sampling method. All impellers in the design space are numerically simulated. The multi-objective optimization algorithm is used to get the Pareto optimal solution between head and efficiency. Looking at the results, 9.154% and 10.15% improvement in head and efficiency are observed at the design point as compared to initial pump. Further, the effect of the three design variables on head and efficiency is also studied. The results indicate that the blade outlet width and blade wrap angle are most significant parameters that affect the efficiency of the pump.