Performance comparison and erosion prediction of jet pumps by using a numerical method

The jet pump has been studied and improved continuously for many years. The improvement of the jet pump’s efficiency brings economic advantages. In this study, the commercial software ANSYS CFX is firstly employed to investigate and compare the performance of a newly designed jet pump with two classical types. Performances such as mass flow ratio, pressure ratio and efficiency are compared at three types of working condition. It’s found that the newly designed type of jet pump has the best performance under the designed working condition. Then, this paper presents erosion evaluation for the new type of jet pump by using a CFD-based particle erosion model. The similar CFD model is conducted for the calculations of the fluid velocity field. A particle-tracking model of the sand particles is used to track the trajectory of sand particles, and Finnie’s model is used as the erosion prediction model. The results demonstrate the erosion intensity and distribution in the jet pump and show the effect of the bended pipe on the erosion in the suction chamber. The results show that numerical simulation can be very helpful for the erosion prediction and further optimization of the jet pump even though the accuracy has not been validated for this study.