Investigations inside a vaned diffuser of a centrifugal pump at low flowrates.

a C Bayeul-Lainé (1) , P Dupont (1) , A Dazin (1) , G Bois (1)

1 LMFL - Laboratoire de Mécanique des Fluides de Lille - Kampé de Fériet

This paper focuses on the unsteady flow behaviour inside the vaned diffuser of a radial flow pump model, operating at partial flowrates (0.387Qi, 0.584Qi and 0.766Qi where Qi is the impeller design flowrate).The effects of the leakage flows are taken into account in the analysis. PIV measurements have been performed at different hub to shroud planes inside one diffuser channel passage for a given speed of rotation, for several flowrates and different angular impeller positions. The performances and the static pressure rise of the diffuser were also measured using a three-holes probe in the same experimental conditions. The unsteady numerical simulations were carried out with Star CCM+ 10.02 code with and without leakage flow. The PIV measurements showed a high unsteadiness at very low flowrate which was confirmed by the numerical calculations. In previous studies it has been shown that the global performances, as the efficiencies are in good agreement between calculations and measurements. In this paper, a joint analysis of measurements and numerical calculations is proposed to improve the understanding of the flow behaviour in a vaned diffuser.

Mots clés: numerical simulation; Experiment; Radial flow pump

Domaines: Sciences de l'environnement

a C Bayeul-Lainé, P Dupont, A Dazin, G Bois. Investigations inside a vaned diffuser of a centrifugal pump at low flowrates.. IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science, 2016, pp.49. ⟨hal-02138068⟩