Cavitation analysis through CFD in industrial pumps: A review

Abstract

Cavitation is one of the most detrimental fluid-dynamic anomalies that occur to turbomachines. It mainly affects machines characterized by high rotation speeds and clear distinctions between low and high pressure zones, where cavitation first appears. During the years, starting from the well known Rayleigh formulation for the formation of bubbles in a liquid medium, many models have been proposed to analyse the phenomenon. Spanning from higher simplifications to more detailed formulations, the range of applications of these models is wide and led to different quality results, where a clear methodology is not fully established when regarding specific sectors, for example the industrial pumps. Restricting the application field to few, specific kinds of pumps, i.e centrifugal, axial flow pumps, external gear and mixed flow pumps, this article analyses the main literature sources in order to give an overall view to the Computational Fluid Dynamic applications of the different cavitation models and their applications to industrial pumps.

Keywords

• Cavitation
• CFD
• Pumps
• Centrifugal pumps
• External gear pumps
• Mixed flow pumps