Research on the effect of wear-ring clearances to the axial and radial force of a centrifugal pump

Abstract

Varying of the wear-ring clearance not only has a distinct effect on the volumetric loss of the centrifugal pump, but also on the performance of the centrifugal pump including the axial and radial forces. Comparing with the experimental studies, numerical simulation methods have some special advantages, such as the low cost, fast and high efficiency, and convenient to get the detailed structure of the internal flow characteristics, so it has been widely used in the fluid machinery study in recent years. In order to study the effect of wear-ring clearance on the force performance of the centrifugal pump, based on the Reynolds Time-Averaged N-S equations and RNG k-ϵ turbulence model, a centrifugal pump with three variable styles of the wear-rings was simulated: Only the clearance of the front wear-ring was changed, only the clearance of the back wear-ring was changed and both were changed. Comparing with the experiment, numerical results show a good agreement. In the three changing styles of the clearance, the variable of the clearance of front wear-ring has the most influence on the axial force of the centrifugal pump, while has tiny effect on the radial force for all the conditions.