NUMERICAL SIMULATION AND OPTIMIZATION OF CAVITATING AND NON CAVITATING FLUID FLOW IN CENTRIFUGAL PUMP

The phenomenon of cavitation is an unsteady flow, which is nearly inevitable in pump. It would degrade the pump performance, produce vibration and noise and even damage the pump. Hence, to improve accuracy of the numerical prediction of the pump cavitation performance is much desirable. In the present work, a cavitation model and the non-cavitation model, is considered to investigate the influence of the empirical coefficients on predicting the pump cavitation performance, concerning a centrifugal pump. one coefficients is analyzed, namely the Absolute pressure (Blade). Also, the experiments are carried out to validate the numerical simulations also investigate the process parameters which would deteriorate the pump performance and cause damage to the pump.