A Hydraulic Design Procedure of Axial-Flow Pump

A radical decrease of the product development time has been achieved by implementation of simulation driven development on axial-flow pump design. A new automatic hydraulic design procedure of axial-flow pumps was developed. It consists of in-house developed parametric design template, Visual Basic macro, OpenFOAM and an in-house developed pump performance plot tool. In this procedure the parametric template includes propeller design and guide vane design. A mesh is generated by using OpenFOAM snappyHexMesh utility. Visual Basic macro is used to link the parametric template and OpenFOAM.In order to validate the accuracy of predicting the hydraulic performance from this procedure, a high specific speed axial-flow pump was designed by using this procedure and an in-house optimization tool. Finally an aluminum scaled prototype was made by CNC machining. The CFD results show that BEP efficiency is equal to 83.5%, and testing shown BEP efficiency of 85%. It indicates that the hydraulic design from this procedure is both reliable and able to produce high efficiency designs.Copyright © 2015 by KSME