PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT OF MIXED FLOW PUMP IMPELLER THROUGH CFD ANALYSIS

Centrifugal pumps are the largest used hydraulic machine.However, the performance of centrifugal pump is generally not very good.Making them more efficient is a major challenge.The performance of the centrifugal pump greatly depends on its geometrical parameters and the vane profile.Computation fluid dynamics (CFD) has been found to be very good tool for numerical analysis of flow through complex system including centrifugal pumps.The present study deals with the performance analysis of a mixed flow type centrifugal pump designed centrifugal pump to deliver 0.25 m 3 /s water at a head of 20 m running at 1450 rpm using ANSYS CFX 14.0 software.Modeling of the pump unit has been done using PTC Cre-o 2.0 software.The performance of the pump was first determined using the initially obtained vane angles.The inlet vane angle and outlet vane angle are then varied to analyses the improvement in pump performance .The results shows that for an initial inlet angle 20.08˚ and outlet angle 16.28˚, the efficiency of the pump is 83 %.however, for an optimized angles at inlet and outlet as 20.16˚ and 16.62˚ respectively, the efficiency of pump raised to 88 % thus showing an improvement in the performance of mixed flow pump.