Research of inner flow in a double blades pump based on openfoam

The inner flow analysis of centrifugal pumps has gradually become an important issue for the hydraulic design and performance improvement. Nowadays, CFD simulation toolbox of pump inner flow mainly contains commercial tools and open source tools. There are some defects for commercial CFD software for the numerical simulation of 3-D turbulent internal flow in pump, especially in capturing the flow characteristics under the off-design operating conditions. Additionally, it is difficult for researchers to do further investigation because of the undeclared source. Therefore, an open source software like Open Field Operation and Manipulation (OpenFOAM) is increasingly popular with researchers from all over the world. In this paper, a new computational study was implemented based on the original solver and was used to directly simulate the steady-state inner flow in a double blades pump, with the specific speed is 111. In order to disclose the characteristics deeply, three research schemes were conducted. The ratios (Q/Qd) of the flow rate are 0.8, 1.0 and 1.2, respectively. The simulation results were verified with the Particle Imaging Velocimetry (PIV) experimental results, and the numerical calculation results agree well with the experimental data. Meanwhile, the phenomena of flow separation under the off-design operating conditions are well captured by OpenFOAM. The results indicate that OpenFOAM possesses obvious strong predominance in computing the internal flow field of pump. The analysis results can also be used as the basis for the further research and the improvement of centrifugal pump.