A Method for the Suppression of Rotating Cavitation by an Accumulator at the Inlet of an Inducer

Abstract

In the present paper, a new method for the suppression of unsteady cavitation in a turbopump inducer is proposed. An accumulator with a large volume is placed at the upstream of the inducer to equalize the pressure around the periphery. Through the experiments with the accumulator, it was found that the occurrence region of rotating cavitation at design flow rate decreases and higher order cavitation instabilities are suppressed. However, at low flow rate, higher order cavitation instabilities were found when the clearance opened to the accumulator was too large.

Keywords

• inducer
• cavitation
• turbomachinery
• rotating cavitation
• accumulator