Radial Force Loads on the Impeller of a Spiral Casing Pump – Comparison of Experiment and CFD Simulation

Abstract

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is becoming a widely used tool in the industrial fields. Experimental methods are expensive and time-consuming and CFD is a suitable substitute. In order to investigate the accuracy between the two methods, the radial force on a 6-bladed impeller was measured. The results reveal that the steady-steady analysis method fails, and higher accuracy is achieved using transient simulation. Fairly good accuracy is achieved when simulating the power parameters, where it is sufficient to use the steady-state method as well to save time. On the other hand, for force load detection, where the magnitude of the radial force varies with the position of the impeller, the transient method should be used. The distribution of the non-stationary radial force vectors is symmetric around the origin and lies mainly in 6 regions, which are the same as the number of impeller blades.