Numerical and Experimental Investigation of Flow Characteristics in a Fluid Self-Lubricating Centrifugal Pump with R134a Refrigerant

Abstract

With the rapid development of information technology, researchers have paid attention to the pump-driven two-phase cooling loop technology for data centers, which imposes requirements on the efficiency and size of the pump. A fluid self-lubricating centrifugal pump with R134a refrigerant was developed to reach a higher rotation speed and oil-free system, resulting in a more diminutive size. Due to the high rotation speed and refrigerant pressure approaching saturated vapor pressure, the internal flow characteristics and cavitating characteristics are critical and complex. This paper focuses on the prototype’s head and cavitation performance based on experimental and numerical data. The experiments indicated that the head coefficient of the pump under design conditions is 0.9881, and the pump’s critical cavitation number and breakdown number are 0.551 and 0.412, respectively. The numerical results can predict the head and cavitation with deviations less than 2.6%. To study changing patterns in flow characteristics under the different operating conditions in the refrigerant centrifugal pump, the numerical model based on a modified Sauer-Schnerr cavitation model was built to analyze the distributions of pressure, temperature, relative velocity, and bubble volume across every hydraulic component and different degrees of cavitation, and proposed the influence of the thermal effect on refrigerant cavitating. The cavitating flow characteristics were obtained with the aim of providing guidance for the hydraulic design of a refrigerant centrifugal pump.