Optimal Design of a Liquid Hydrogen Centrifugal Pump Impeller

Abstract

Global energy consumption has continued to increase in recent years with economic development. Fossil energy sources are now being replaced with renewable energy, and hydrogen is one of such alternatives. Pumps are used for storage, transportation, and distribution. One such pump is the liquefied hydrogen centrifugal pump. In this study, optimisation design of a liquefied hydrogen centrifugal pump was performed using the response surface method, which is the optimisation method of the DesignXplorer provided by ANSYS, based on the flow analysis results of the impeller of the centrifugal pump. The design variables used in the optimisation process are the outlet width b2, % of the blade thickness Su2, leading edge inclination angle α, hub inclination angle δ, wrap angle θ, and outlet blade angle β2. The optimisation analysis results obtained confirmed that all the selected design variables are semi-galactic and are sensitive to pump efficiency and head. It was confirmed that the efficiency of the centrifugal pump achieved using liquefied hydrogen as the working fluid is approximately 82.4%, which is significantly higher than that achieved by a centrifugal pump using water as the working fluid under the same operating conditions.