Design Improvement of Radial Flow Submersible Pump using CFD

Abstract

The demand of high efficient and energy saver submersible pumps has increased a lot. This made manufacturers to improve the current design and manufacturing process of pumps. For improving the design of pumps, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) softwares have turned to be very useful before actual manufacturing of pump. The CFD technique is very useful as it saves cost and time for prototyping and testing different models. It also helps in better understanding the pump phenomena. In the present study, CFD analysis of 8-stage radial flow submersible pump (discharge: 7 lps and head: 18 m per stage) manufactured by M/s Duke Plasto Techniques Pvt. Ltd. Palanpur is carried out. The analysis was carried out by altering various parameters like grid and turbulence model to reach best efficiency point. From the analysis, it was concluded that shear stress transport turbulence model gave the nearer result to experiment with grid size of about 25 lakh elements. The numerical analysis was carried out at different mass flow rates and operating pressure. To improve the efficiency of pump, the impeller blades were redesigned and its modeling was done using SolidWorks 14. The CFD analysis of the modified impeller was done and results were compared with existing model. The modified impeller led to around 5% improvement in pump efficiency.