Performance of the Centrifugal Pump of Double Suction using the Computational Fluid Dynamics Method

Centrifugal pumps of double suction are widely used in industrial and agricultural applications as their flow rate is twice that of single suction pumps with the same impeller diameter. The present work was carried out with the objective of simulating the performance of the double suction centrifugal pump BCP 125-420 by means of the Computational Fluid Dynamics method. For this, the methodological aspects to follow for the simulation and evaluation of the turbo machine operation were established using Computational Fluid Dynamics techniques and ANSYS Workbench software in version 14.5. All of this was done following the methodological recommendations referred in the literature related to the modeling of these devices. Among the main results, there is the value of the height predicted through the simulation and the real height of the pump, with magnitudes of 81,65 and 81,83 mwc, respectively; values that exceeded the 80 mca initially foreseen for the design and that allowed concluding that the error between the real height of the pump and the one obtained through the simulation did not exceed 1%, which indicated the reliability in performance of the BCP 125-420 double suction centrifugal pump under the operation conditions studied.