Unsteady flow analysis and experimental investigation of axial-flow pump

The three-dimensional unsteady turbulent flow in axial-flow pumps was simulated based on Navier-Stoke solver embedded with k – ɛ RNG turbulence model and SIMPLEC algorithm. Numerical results show that the unsteady prediction results are more accurate than the steady results, and the maximal error of unsteady prediction is only 4.54%. The time-domain spectrums show that the static pressure fluctuation curves at the inlet and outlet of the rotor and the outlet of the stator are periodic, and all have four peaks and four valleys. The pressure fluctuation amplitude increases from the hub to the tip at the inlet and outlet of the rotor, but decreases at the outlet of the stator. The pressure fluctuation amplitude is the greatest at the inlet of the rotor, and the average amplitude decreases sharply from the inlet to the outlet. The frequency spectrums obtained by Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) show that the dominant frequency is approximately equal to the blade passing frequency. The static pressure on the pressure side of hydrofoil on different stream surfaces remains almost consistent, and increases gradually from the blade inlet to the exit on the suction side at different time steps. The axial velocity distribution is periodic and is affected by the stator blade number at the rotor exit. The experimental results show that the flow is almost axial and the pre-rotation is very small at the rotor inlet under the conditions of 0.8 Q N – 1.2 Q N . Due to the clearance leakage, the pressure, circulation and meridional velocity at the rotor outlet all decrease near the hub leakage and tip clearance regions.