A body-force model for waterjet pump simulation
Journal article, 2019

The role of waterjet pump is to generate thrust by increasing the flow head. Details of the flow inside waterjet pump are important when pump performance is of the main interest. However, in waterjet self-propulsion, pump induced effects are of the main interest rather than the details of the flow inside the pump. This permits sim- plification of pump models when using numerical methods for simulating the flow. In order to find a robust and yet accurate pump model suitable for Computational Fluid Dynamics based methods, models of different so- phistication level are studied in this paper. First, a Sliding Mesh approach, which is capable of capturing the flow details, is validated against a set of cavitation tunnel measurements. Then a series of simpler models, i.e. Moving Reference Frame technique and three different body-force models, are studied and their results are compared to the ones obtained from the Sliding Mesh approach. The results indicate that one of the body-force models which takes the guide vanes as well as the impeller induced flow swirl into account has the best compromise between the robustness and accuracy among the investigated pump models.

Waterjet pump

Moving reference frame

Sliding mesh

Body-force model

Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes

Waterjet propulsion

Author

Arash Eslamdoost

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

Marko Vikström

Kongsberg Hydrodynamic Research Centre

Applied Ocean Research

0141-1187 (ISSN)

Vol. 90 101832

Driving Forces

Sustainable development

Areas of Advance

Transport

Infrastructure

C3SE (Chalmers Centre for Computational Science and Engineering)

Subject Categories

Fluid Mechanics and Acoustics

DOI

10.1016/j.apor.2019.05.017

More information

Latest update

7/10/2019