Author : Ankita Maity, Vignesh Chandrashekharan and Muhammad Wasim Afzal

Owing to its unique design, low cost, compact size and low specific speed, regenerative centrifugal pumps are the subject of increased interest in industrial applications. Apart from having these features, they are capable of delivering high heads with stable performance characteristics. They are capable of developing high pressure ratios in a single stage permitting to achieve a head which is equivalent to that of several centrifugal stages obtained from a single rotor with comparable tip speeds. In this paper, an attempt has been made to use computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software to simulate the flow within the regenerative pump and validate the CFD results with experimental data. Several numerical models were analyzed in the study for performance enhancement. It is observed that for the configuration with the outlet chamber having curved walls, the performance of the pump increased due to the decrease in the vortex flow in the impellers, thus minimizing the chances of head loss. Also, the configuration with the semicircular static fluid design on the sides of the impeller showed a significant improvement in the performance compared to the original model. The other design configurations show how the positioning of the impeller blades with respect to each other affects the efficiency of the pump by enhancing the toroidal motion of the fluid.

Keywords: Regenerative centrifugal pump, Multi staging, Vortex flow, Toroidal motion, Flow field, Rotating stall, Unsteady analysis, Time periodic

Article published in International Journal of Current Engineering and Technology, Vol.5, No.4 (Aug-2015)