Cavitating Flow Calculations in Industry

Abstract

This paper presents the experiences of two pump manufacturers with numerical cavitation prediction methods available in commercial computational fluid dynamic software or in codes developed in-house. The intention of the authors is to evaluate these methods and their capabilities in predicting the cavitating performance of pumps from an industrial point of view.In the first part of the article, benchmarks were set for three different commercial software packages on the basis of a comparison of measurements obtained for a centrifugal pump. In the second part, the results of a commercial code are compared, for different impellers, to those obtained with a simplified cavitation prediction code.The abilities and the benefits of the various approaches to cavitation prediction in the design process of a pump are discussed.