Numerical Investigations of Unsteady Flow in a Centrifugal Pump with a Vaned Diffuser
Journal article, 2013

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analyses were made to study the unsteady three-dimensional turbulence in the ERCOFTAC centrifugal pump test case. The simulations were carried out using the OpenFOAM Open Source CFD software. The test case consists of an unshrouded centrifugal impeller with seven blades and a radial vaned diffuser with 12 vanes. A large number of measurements are available in the radial gap between the impeller and the diffuse, making this case ideal for validating numerical methods. Results of steady and unsteady calculations of the flow in the pump are compared with the experimental ones, and four different turbulent models are analyzed. The steady simulation uses the frozen rotor concept, while the unsteady simulation uses a fully resolved sliding grid approach. The comparisons show that the unsteady numerical results accurately predict the unsteadiness of the flow, demonstrating the validity and applicability of that methodology for unsteady incompressible turbomachinery flow computations.The steady approach is less accurate, with an unphysical advection of the impeller wakes, but accurate enough for a crude approximation. The different turbulence models predict the flow at the same level of accuracy, with slightly different results.

Turbomachinery

Sliding grid

Frozen rotor

CFD

OpenFOAM

Ercoftac Centrifugal Pump

Author

Olivier Petit

Chalmers, Applied Mechanics, Fluid Dynamics

Håkan Nilsson

Chalmers, Applied Mechanics, Fluid Dynamics

International Journal of Rotating Machinery

1023-621X (ISSN) 1542-3034 (eISSN)

Vol. Volume 2013 961580

Areas of Advance

Energy

Infrastructure

C3SE (Chalmers Centre for Computational Science and Engineering)

Subject Categories

Fluid Mechanics and Acoustics

DOI

10.1155/2013/961580

More information

Created

10/7/2017