A Cfd Analysis of Centrifugal Pump to Improve Discharge by Varying Blade Geometry

Centrifugal pumps are used in cooling the engine by pumping water as coolant into the engine. The normal function of the coolant is to discharge coolant at a specific velocity into the engine coolant volume, once the coolant crosses 150 C temperatures then it is taken to the radiator for cooling to 50 C. Due to changes in the engine design it is desired to have changes in the centrifugal pump design demanding for a larger discharge. The current discharge is 1.8 lit/s the objective will be to increase the discharge which can be done by changing the blade angulations. One more variable which will be used to control the discharge will be the gap between the cover and the impeller. Presently the gap is 1.5mm and the objective will be to reduce the gap and determine whether this will have impact in the overall discharge. Decreasing will improve discharge provided there is no increase in the turbulence of the system. FLOTRAN CFD is coupled field analysis software which couples the two physics environment namely CFD and thermal module in Ansys will be simulate the flow. KeywordsBlade Geometries, Centrifugal Pump and FLOTRAN CFD