Experimental Study and Simulation of Test Loop Flow Characteristics for Vertical Pumps

The efficiency and performance of pump involving multiple pumping units depends not only on the efficiency of the pumping units but also on the proper design of the test loop. The proper design of pump intake is not an easy task because of the various site- specific geometrical and hydraulic constraints. The time and cost involved in sump model studies for design and optimization of sump geometry can be reduced to a large extent through CFD studies. However, writing a separate code for each new product is not feasible. Hence this work is aimed at determining the feasibility of commercial CFD software as a design optimization tool for pump sumps. In the present study commercially available software ANSYS CFX has been used for CFD analysis of flow conditions in a pump sump and the results obtained are found to be in good agreement with the experimentally observed flow patterns.