Numerical and experimental study of the influence of drag reduction agent (carboxy methyl cellulose) on the central jet pump performance

Several experimental and theoretical investigations have been carried out to improve the performance of the jet pump through study of the influence of various geometric variables on its overall efficiency. To the best knowledge of the authors, none of these investigations studied the effect of the use of polymer solutions, e.g. carboxy methyl cellulose (CMC), as an agent of drag reduction on the jet pump performance, which is the objective of the present work. The present numerical study is carried out and compared with the previous experimental results explained in Gazzar et al. [1]. A computational fluid dynamics code is used to predict the performance of the jet pump and to shed more light on the mechanism of the mixing process especially if the primary stream is a Newtonian fluid, while the secondary stream is (the polymer solution) assumed to be a non-Newtonian fluid. Discussion and comparison between the experimental and theoretical results are included. The results of this comparison prove the validity of the computational code used, and illustrate the prominent effect of adding drag reduction agents (CMC) on jet pump performance.