Numerical Simulation Study of Wear in a Segmented-Blade Helical Centrifugal Deep-Sea Mining Pump

The deep-sea mining pump is a core component in deep-sea mineral resource extraction, whose performance directly determines the transportation efficiency of coarse-grained ore and overall system reliability. However, deep-sea mining pumps suffer from severe abrasion of internal components due to continuous impact by coarse ore particles, leading to short service life and high maintenance costs. These issues adversely impact the economics and continuity of mining operations. Consequently, studying the solid-liquid flow to understand wear mechanisms and develop optimized, wear-resistant designs is crucial for enhancing pump performance. This paper establishes a fully coupled solid-liquid two-phase flow platform by integrating Fluent and EDEM, based on an artificial diffusion-based coarse-particle CFD-DEM (Computational Fluid Dynamics-Discrete Element Method) approach, to systematically investigate the critical technical issue of internal pump wear. The study finds that wear in traditional spiral centrifugal pump blades is primarily concentrated on the leading edge and the middle section. On the leading edge, wear comprises 56.4% cutting wear and 44.7% impact wear; in contrast, cutting wear accounts for 96.8% of the total wear in the middle section. To address the premature failure of traditional impeller blades caused by localized wear concentration, this paper proposes an optimized design for a novel spiral centrifugal impeller with segmented blades. By modifying the impeller structure, the proposed design relocates the primary wear zones to the leading edges of the two blade segments, thereby facilitating the application of anti-wear treatments.