Numerical Study of a Self Priming Regenerative Pump for Improved Performance using Geometric Modifications

Regenerative centrifugal pumps (RCP) have gained significance in in industry as these pumps produce less noise and have low specific speed. They are compact in size but capable of delivering high heads with stable performance characteristics. Regenerative pumps are classified as turbo machines that can develop high static head within a single stage. In this paper, the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for simulating and analyzing the flow field within a regenerative pump and validation study of the CFD results with the experimental work is presented. Several numerical models were analyzed in the study for performance enhancement. It is observed that for configurations having greater number of impeller vanes, static pressure developed by the pump, increased significantly and vice versa. For configurations with splitter vanes introduced near the vicinity of the outlet chamber of the pump, the performance of the pump increased to a greater extent due to reduction in the large recirculation zone which occurs near the exit flow path, Also the configuration having radial inlet and exit chamber with constant width showed a significant improvement in the performance when compared to the base model.