Numerical simulation of cavitation effects influenced by centrifugal pump inlet parameters

Cavitation has great influence on performance of the centrifugal pump. However, there is still no effective design to overcome this problem. Blade leading edge of centrifugal pump impeller is the initial position of cavitation. The leading edge geometry shape not only has a great influence on the cavitation inception and its development, but also a great influence on the flow state near the impeller inlet. In this paper, the numerical simulation method is adopted. Cavitation of four different models (including rectangular-shape blade model, circular-arc-shape blade model, elliptical-shape blade model and cusp-shape blade model) are simulated under the same condition by changing the NPSHA value. The influence of different blade models on cavitation performance is analyzed. The results show that the deviation between the simulated data and experimental data is within the deviation range. The head of rectangular-shape blade model and circular-arc-shape blade model are higher than those of elliptical-shape blade model and cusp-shape blade model. However, the head of rectangular-shape blade model and circular-arc-shape blade model is smaller than the latter under the low effective cavitation margin. What's more, the head of the models with trimmed blade are higher than the head of the models with untrimmed blade under the working condition but are smaller under the low effective cavitation margin.