Transient Behavior of a Prototype Centrifugal Pump with Abrupt Decreasing Flow Rate

Abstract

Centrifugal pump often operates at different working flow rates to meet engineering requirement. To better reveal the transient behavior of centrifugal pump in the process of decreasing flow rate, the finite volume method (FVM), RNG k-ε turbulence model, sliding mesh technology, and user-defined functions (UDF) were employed to simulate the three-dimensional unsteady viscous incompressible flow in a low-specific-speed centrifugal pump during the abrupt valve-off period. The results show that the differences are very obvious between transient and quasi-steady calculations. The velocity is maximum on the wall of hub and shroud, while the velocity is minimum and uniform distribution at middle positions. The transient flow field lags behind the quasi-steady flow field, which may be related to the reasons; namely, kinetic energy cannot convert pressure energy in time.