Cavitation improvement of double suction centrifugal pump HPP Fuhren

Abstract

A double suction storage pump has been refurbished because of the strong cavitation which resulted in cavitation damage on blade and consequently in frequent repairs of the impeller. The analyses of the old and the new impeller were done by the computational fluid dynamics (CFD), performing transient simulations with the commercial solver Ansys CFX. In the simulations, the scale-adaptive-simulation with the curvature correction (SAS-CC) turbulence model was used. No model tests were carried out. Additionally, observations with the digital camera were made through the specially designed plexi-glass window, mounted at the lid at the suction side. The predicted pump head at the operating point agrees well with the pump characteristics measurements, performed with the direct thermodynamic method. The extent of the cavitation predicted by CFD is smaller than the observed one because the cloud cavitation was not predicted. The observations of the cavitation extent show that the impeller design is better than the old one, which was also possible to anticipate based on the CFD results.