NUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECT OF THE NUMBERS OF BLADES ON THE CENTRIFUGAL PUMP PERFORMANCE AT CONSTANT PARAMETERS

In the present paper, the performance of a centrifugal pump with the same parameters which are the head, rotating speed, volume flow rate and the outlet diameter; however, with different number of blades has been investigated numerically by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) using Shear Stress Transport (SST) as a turbulence model. The simulation has been done using ANSYS®, Vista CPDTM Release 15.0, to study the effect of the variation of the blade number on the centrifugal pump performance. The numerical study has been carried out by obtaining the pressure for three different conditions of a centrifugal pump in which each one has the same parameters, but with different numbers of blades that start from five to sixteen. The simulation showed strong results. The pressure increases obviously with a specific number of blades then decreases. Thus, each centrifugal pump with exact parameters has a perfect performance at specific blade number.