EFFECT OF SURFACE ROUGHNESS, INLET GAS VOLUME FRACTION AND TEMPERATUREON THE PERFORMANCE OF A NON CAVITATING CENTRIFUGAL PUMP USING DESIGN OF EXPERIMENTS

In this study the Design of Experiments Methodology along with the Response Surface Method has been used to investigate the effect of surface roughness, Inlet Gas Volume Fraction(IGVF) and fluid temperature on the head and efficiency of the centrifugal pump. The simulations have been carried out in ANSYS CFX using the k-ω SST turbulence model. The meshing of the domain has been done using hexahedral elements and the y plus value overthe blade surfaces is kept below 2. The Central Composite Design of the factors has been adopted and the sensitivity of the input parameters has been reported. The sensitivities of the individual effects are calculated and it is observed that inlet gas volume fraction (IVGF) is the most critical parameter that negatively effects the pump performance