Investigation of Impeller Geometrical Parameters on the Performance Characteristics of a Centrifugal Pump

The selection of geometrical parameters plays a vital role in the design of the centrifugal pump impellers. In this paper, ranking the influence of various geometrical parameters on output characteristics is presented with computational fluid dynamics (CFD). A centrifugal pump impeller blade with a backward curved profile was designed by tangent circular arc method to deliver a flow rate of 16 litres per second, 32 metre head and with a speed of 2900 rpm at the duty point. Using a standard k-ε turbulence model with the unstructured tetrahedral grid, the performance was predicted and validated with experiments. The validated CFD model was developed and presented. Based on the requirements of head, efficiency and power input, modification in the dimension of these three parameters could yield a superior performance.