A Numerical Study on the Improvement of Suction Performance and Hydraulic Efficiency for a Mixed-Flow Pump Impeller

This paper describes a numerical study on the improvement of suction performance and hydraulic efficiency of a mixed-flow pump by impellers. The design of these impellers was optimized using a commercial CFD (computational fluid dynamics) code and DOE (design of experiments). The design variables of meridional plane and vane plane development were defined for impeller design. In DOE, variables of inlet part were selected as main design variables in meridional plane, and incidence angle was selected in vane plane development. The verification of the experiment sets that were generated by factorial was done by numerical analysis. The objective functions were defined as the NPSHre (net positive suction head required), total efficiency, and total head of the impellers. The importance of the geometric design variables was analyzed using factorial designs. The interaction between the NPSHre and total efficiency, according to the meridional plane and incidence angle, was discussed by analyzing the factorial design results. The performance of optimally designed model was verified by experiments and numerical analysis and the reliability of the model was retained by comparison of numerical analysis and comparative analysis with the reference model.