NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF FLOW FIELD OF CENTRIFUGAL SLURRY PUMP HANDLING MULTI-SIZE PARTICULATE SLURRIES

Abstract

Centrifugal pumps have been generally used for transportation of solid-liquid mixtures through pipelines over small to medium distances. The performance of the pump for different types of mixtures is estimated by applying suitable correction factors to its water performance. Many empirical corrections are available to predict the pump performance which shows wide variation for any given mixture. In recent years, computational fluid dynamics has been used for flow modelling due to easy availability of computational resources and commercial software. In this work, efforts have been made to estimate the flow of water and water-solid mixtures using commercial code ANSYS-FLUENT. The multi-sized particulate mixture has been modelled using the Eulerian-Eulerian approach with Eulerian multiphase model in FLUENT 14.0. The mass flow inlet and pressure outlet has been taken as the boundary conditions for flow simulation through the pump. Unstructured mesh is used for discretization and MRF model is applied with interfaces at the inlet and casing of the pump. The two equation k- F, turbulence model has been applied for turbulence modelling. SIMPLE algorithm is used for pressure-velocity coupling and first order upwind scheme is adopted for solution algorithm. Grid independency test was carried out and the numerical model was validated with experimental data for water. Parametric analysis was then performed to determine the effect of some of physical quantities viz, pump speed, solid concentration, and particle size.