Investigation of the flow energy dissipation law in a centrifugal impeller in pump mode

Centrifugal impeller is usually designed for water pumping. Fluid get energy from impeller but also lose energy when passing through it. To improve the efficiency and have a better operation stability, it is necessary to understand the flow energy dissipation in centrifugal impeller in pump mode. In this case, a thermodynamic analysis is conducted on a model centrifugal pump unit based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. Typical performance curve is found with a positive-slope efficiency curve and a negative-slope head curve. With the decreasing of flow rate, both the impeller head and the flow energy dissipation (FED) will rise up. The FED is found related to the flow regime. The complex undesirable flow pattern induces high FED under off-design conditions especially at very small partial-load. Based on the visualization, FED is found with two main sources including the wall friction and the flow interaction. At over-load and design-load, the wall friction induced FED is dominant. With the decreasing of flow rate, flow interaction induced FED becomes dominant. The typical strong FED sites are found related to the striking, separation, merging and interaction of both smooth flow and vortical flow. The FED analysis will correlate the pump performance estimation and guide the design.