The ERCOFTAC centrifugal pump OpenFOAM case-study

Paper in proceeding, 2009

This work investigates the rotor-stator interaction features of OpenFOAM-1.5-dev, such as frozen rotor and sliding grid. The case studied is the ERCOFTAC Test Case U3: Centrifugal Pump with a Vaned Diffuser, a testcase from the ERCOFTAC Turbomachinery Special Interest Group. The case was presented by Combès at the ERCOFTAC Seminar and Workshop on Turbomachinery Flow Prediction VII, in Aussois, 1999. It is a valid test case for evaluation of rotor-stator interaction features, as detailed experimental data is available. The investigation shows that OpenFOAM gives results that are comparable to the experimental data, in particular for the sliding grid case. The results are less accurate in the frozen rotor simulation due to the improper treatment of the impeller wakes that is part of the frozen rotor formulation. The ERCOFTAC centrifugal pump OpenFOAM case-study was developed as a contribution to the OpenFOAM Turbomachinery Working Group, and was presented and discussed at the Fourth OpenFOAM Workshop in Montréal, 2009. The complete set-up of the case-study is available from the OpenFOAM-extend project at SourceForge, and instructions and comments are available from the OpenFOAM Wiki.