Radial thrust of single-blade centrifugal pump

Single-blade centrifugal pump is used as a sewage pump widely. However, single-blade centrifugal pump impeller is acted on a big radial thrust during the pump operation because the impeller is an asymmetry geometrically. Therefore when the reliability of the pump is secured, it is necessary to grasp a radial thrust quantitatively and elucidate the behavior and outbreak mechanism. This study investigated the radial thrust acting on single-blade centrifugal impeller by an experiment and CFD analysis. As a result, the behavior of the radial thrust with the flow rate change was clarified. Furthemore, the radial thrust was divided to an unsteady component, a momentum component and a pressure component by applying unsteady conservation of momentum to this impeller. The grand total of these components accorded with the radial thrust that calculated by direct CFD analysis well. And the behavior of each divided component was shown. In addition, the effect of those components that gave to the radial thrust was clarified.