Accelerating the design of gerotor pumps using interactive tools and fast simulation

Gerotors are a family of mechanical pumps used for cooling, lubrication and fuel transfer in aerospace, medicine, etc. Modern industry demands to shorten the development time of products. This means further integration between the different design stages. As in any hydraulic machinery, an important bottleneck in the design process is the simulation time to validate designs. This is due mainly to the fact that Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) remains the go-to tool to perform simulations of hydraulic phenomena. One way to reduce this bottleneck is to adopt approximate yet fast simulation routines to refine the design before entering a precise simulation stage. This manuscript presents an interactive design tool that estimates the efficiency response of gerotor pumps using fast simulation routines. The presented tool intends to shorten and accelerate the design cycles of Gerotor pumps by providing the engineer with an estimation of the effect of geometry changes in the pump’s efficiencies in real time. The software tool integrates 2D and 3D design capabilities with real-time simulation response. The resulting efficiency estimations differ from the CFD models in maximum 8% in the case of volumetric efficiency. For mechanical efficiency the error ranges between around 20% and 45%, but the pump’s internal forces is estimated within a 1% accuracy. Future work focuses on refining the accuracy of the efficiency estimations and further integration of the design tool with physical data.