Evaluation of the Effect of Diffuser Vanes on the Performance of Multistage Pump Using Numerical Simulation

The multistage pump has a wide range of applications and accounts for a large amount of global energy consumption, therefore, performance evaluation and head loss study are not only economically beneficial, but also help in energy conservation. Efforts are being made to improve the performance of pumps to make them energy efficient the study requires a critical review of existing geometry and finding the opportunity for improvement of the performance of the pump. This kind of study requires critical analysis and thorough knowledge about the 3D flow field inside the pump along with an appropriate tool to analyze flow behavior and various flow parameters. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a reliable and suitable tool that gives accurate and practical results. In this study, at various operating conditions, a CFD technique is used to assess various flow parameters at different heads and discharges. Thus the main focus of this study is to evaluate head losses in different components of the multistage pump and their behavior of that concerning the number of diffuser vanes over the various operating conditions. Geometry is prepared using Creo parametric and meshing was done in ICEM-CFD. Commercial CFD code Ansys- CFX is used for simulation.