CFD Analysis of a Regenerative Pump for Performance Enhancement

Regenerative centrifugal pumps (RCP) are the subject of increased interest in industry as these pumps produce less noise, have low specific speed and are compact but capable of delivering high heads with stable performance characteristics. The regenerative flow pumps are essentially rotodynamic turbo machines capable of developing high pressure ratios within a single stage. This paper presents the approach of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for simulating and analyzing the flow field within a regenerative pump and validation study of the CFD results with the experimental work. Several numerical models were analyzed in the study for performance improvement. It is observed that for configurations having greater number of impeller blades, static pressure developed by the pump, increased significantly and vice versa, and when compared to that of the original model. For configurations with splitter vanes introduced near the vicinity of the outlet flow domain of the pump, the performance of the pump increased to a greater extent due to reduction in the large recirculation zone which occurs near the exit flow path, as compared to the original model.