Assessment of a turbulence model for numerical predictions of sheet-cavitating flows in centrifugal pumps

Various approaches have been developed for numerical predictions of unsteady cavitating turbulent flows. To verify the influence of a turbulence model on the simulation of unsteady attached sheet-cavitating flows in centrifugal pumps, two modified RNG k-epsilon models (DCM and FBM) are implemented in ANSYS-CFX 13.0 by second development technology, so as to compare three widespread turbulence models in the same platform. The simulation has been executed and compared to experimental results for three different flow coefficients. For four operating conditions, qualitative comparisons are carried out between experimental and numerical cavitation patterns, which are visualized by a high-speed camera and depicted as isosurfaces of vapor volume fraction alpha(v) = 0.1, respectively. The comparison results indicate that, for the development of the sheet attached cavities on the suction side of the impeller blades, the numerical results with different turbulence models are very close to each other and overestimate the experiment ones slightly. However, compared to the cavitation performance experimental curves, the numerical results have obvious difference: the prediction precision with the FBM is higher than the other two turbulence models. In addition, the loading distributions around the blade section at midspan are analyzed in detail. The research results suggest that, for numerical prediction of cavitating flows in centrifugal pumps, the turbulence model has little influence on the development of cavitation bubbles, but the advanced turbulence model can significantly improve the prediction precision of head coefficients and critical cavitation numbers.