Numerical study of turbulent flow past a rotating axial-flow pump based on a level-set immersed boundary method

Large-eddy simulation is performed to study the turbulence statistics and flow structures of water past a rotating axial-flow pump under different flow-rate working conditions. A novel sharp-interface level-set based immersed boundary method applied capture complex geometry pump. An unstructured triangular mesh used discretize surface pump, ray-tracing employed classify computational domain into fluid solid regions. Turbulence statistics, including mean velocity, turbulent kinetic energy (TKE), production, dissipation, are analyzed five conditions around designed condition. The results show that unsteady wake, tip leakage flow, separation accompanied by high TKE magnitude. For intensity off-designed conditions, plays leading role at low flow-rates, dominates flow-rates.