The basic purpose of a pump intake is to supply water with a uniform velocity at the entry of an impeller. The fluid flow in Pump intakes is rather complex involving expansions and turns together with fluid-structure interactions. The intake of pumps is usually designed analytically, based on standard designs, best practices and also previous implementation experience. These basic designs are often updated to accommodate varying pump flow rates or different site limitations. Such changes can affect approach flow characteristics and result in under performance of pumps. Pumps are known to experience common operational problems such as decreased flow rate and head, power effects, and increased vibration and noise. Pumps can in extreme cases experience impeller corrosion due to cavitation and excessive wear of shafts, bearings, wear rings, and couplings. This results in a Lack of pump efficiency and reliability degradation, which leads to a significant increase in operating and maintenance costs. Such issues are related to certain undesirable characteristics of the approach flow and are caused primarily by poor design of the pump intake structure. Due to the high cost of the construction and operation of
laboratory models and the limited measurements taken, the utilization of numerical modeling as an alternative tool for
studying complex flow problems has become popular with the rapid development of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software. we can predict the flow parameters at the pump inlet with the change in geometry without actual running of the pump with CFD. Hence the design of the sump can be optimized to keep the flow parameters below limiting values. This study attempts to Study the Parameters Affect on Pump Intake Design and model the flow characteristic in a pump sump, minimize the swirl angles, increase the flow at the pump inlet and keep the flow parameters below limiting values. by using (CFD) code FLUENT. The numerical study carried out in this paper aims at optimizing the overall fluid flow in a pump intake by the use of a commercially available CFD code. CFD study was carried out on initial sump geometry and initial CFD results were analyzed. |
