Research on Design of High-Efficiency Fire Turbopump Supplying Water from Low-Level Water Resources

Abstract

According to requirements of fire service, turbopump is used to supply water from low-level water resources. The efficiency of agricultural irrigation turbopump is too low to provide sufficient water to fire control, so a fire turbopump is designed in this paper. It is common to design a turbopump by empirical methods, but this causes turbopump not to operate at best efficiency point. Therefore, three design concepts of new turbopump model, existing hydraulic match model and turbopump conversion model are discussed. Their theories and application conditions are also listed. After design of fire turbopump by new turbopump model, numerical simulation is conducted to analyze the pressure field to predict operating status. The open rig experiment is also presented to confirm its performance characteristics. The pump head and flow rate of the designed turbopump meets the requirements of fire ground and it is proved that the efficiency of fire turbopump is much higher than irrigation turbopump, which indicates the new turbopump model is an effective strategy to design turbopump.