Numerical Assessment of Cavitation Erosion Risk in a Commercial Water-Jet Pump
Journal article, 2022

In this paper, the risk of cavitation erosion is assessed in a commercial water-jet pump using a recently developed numerical erosion assessment method by Arabnejad et al. [1]. This assessment is performed for two flow conditions with different cavitation erosion risk according to the experimental paint tests and the high erosion risk areas identified by the method are compared with the experimental results. This comparison shows that the applied method is capable of both identifying the regions of high erosion risk and also capturing the difference between the cavitation erosion risk in the two studied conditions. The latter capability of the numerical assessment method, which has not been reported in the literature for other published methods, is one step forward toward the application of the method in the design process of hydraulic machines. Furthermore, the numerical results are analysed to explain the reasons for different erosion risk in the two conditions. This analysis reveals that this difference is mostly related to the stronger flow non-uniformities entering the rotor in the most erosive condition. Using the numerical results, one reason behind these stronger nonuniformities is identified to be the stronger bursting of vortices shed from the shaft in the most erosive condition.

Author

Mohammad Hossein Arabnejad Khanouki

Chalmers, Mechanics and Maritime Sciences (M2), Marine Technology

Urban Svennberg

Kongsberg Maritime Sweden AB

Rickard Bensow

Chalmers, Mechanics and Maritime Sciences (M2), Marine Technology

Journal of Fluids Engineering, Transactions of the ASME

0098-2202 (ISSN) 1528-901X (eISSN)

Vol. 144 5 FE-21-1084

Areas of Advance

Transport

Energy

Subject Categories

Energy Engineering

Fluid Mechanics and Acoustics

Infrastructure

C3SE (Chalmers Centre for Computational Science and Engineering)

DOI

10.1115/1.4052634

More information

Latest update

2/1/2022 1