Performance comparison of centrifugal pump in variation of impeller blade number through numerical simulation

Centrifugal pump is indispensable equipment for various industrial applications which mainly used to move fluid by supplying head at specified flow rate. Pump performance is influenced by occurrence of losses which consist of volumetric, hydraulic and mechanical losses which further quantified by corresponding efficiency. In its application, real operating pump performance is quite difficult to predict without referring to manufacture data report which measure pump performance directly during operation of the pump This research is aimed to investigate numerically the pump performance variation with respect to the number of blades. A specified pump has operating condition of head 12.08 m, flowrate of 0.0015 m3/s, rating rotation of 2800 rpm with 7 blades is investigated. The performance analysis is performed through numerical simulation using ANSYS. Performance comparison is carried in varied blade number of 5,7 and 9. The performance of centrifugal pump is determined in terms of head (H) and flow rate (Q), as well as pump hydrodynamic efficiency (h). It is found that the higher head occured in the case of 9 blades up to a certain limit. On the other hand, hydrodynamic efficiency in the case of 7 blade is higher than the other two cases for simulated flow rate range. From the head and flow rate relationship, it is noted that the pattern produced by plotting head and efficiency against flow rate indicate that there is an optimum number of impeller blade for centrifugal pump.