Influence of guide vanes on the flow fields and performance of axial pump under unsteady flow conditions: Numerical study

Influence of different guide vanes on structural of flow field and axial pump performance under unsteady flow is carried out using numerical method. A three-dimensional axial flow pump model is numerically simulated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method with four number of impeller blades and 3, 4, 5 and 6 guide vanes depend on the SIMPLE code, standard turbulence k-E model as well as sliding mesh method (SMM). The static, dynamic, total pressures, shear stress, velocity magnitude and turbulent kinetic energy are the important features which affecting instability operation in the pump. By monitoring above parameters and setting different measurement pressure points, the average pressures in the pump are discussed and the effect of guide vanes on the average pressure is analyzed. The results demonstrate that the numerical calculations can provide good accurately prediction for the characteristics of internal flow in the pump. The numerical results are closed to experimental results the minimum errors of pressure differences can reach 2.5% and the maximum errors 6.5%. The guide vanes have more effect on the flow field and pressure variations especially at outlet region in the axial pump. As compared with the using various guide vanes, the pressure increases as number of vanes increase that can lead the performance of pump also increases. Pressure differences in the pump at variety mass flow for vane 6 is higher than other vanes 3, 4 and 5 by 14.13, 11.35 and 3.85% for flow of 5 L/min. Further, the dynamic pressure differences for design flow between different vanes 6, 5, 4 and 3 are about by 2.87, 7.26 and 8.51% respectively.