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Frontiers | Numerical and Experimental Analysis of Influence of Impeller Structures on Slurry Pump Performance

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Energy Res., 22 November 2021

Sec. Advanced Clean Fuel Technologies

Volume 9 - 2021 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fenrg.2021.762159

This article is part of the Research TopicCleaner Treatment Technologies and Productions in The Energy IndustryView all 24 articles

Numerical and Experimental Analysis of Influence of Impeller Structures on Slurry Pump Performance

Guangjie Peng¹*Jialin Du¹Hao Chang¹*Qiang Chen¹Jiahu Li²Chengxiang Pan²Yongfei Yang³

• ¹Research Center of Fluid Machinery Engineering and Technology, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, China
• ²Xiangyang Wuerwu Pump Co., Ltd, Xiangyang, China
• ³School of Mechanical Engineering, Nantong University, Nantong, China

Slurry pump as an important equipment for transporting coal, which are widely used in power plants, mines and other fossil energy field. Therefore, the improvement of slurry pump performance can effectively reduce the energy loss of fossil energy industry. In this paper, a novel impeller with splitter blade structure was proposed, and the internal flow field of slurry pumps with different impeller structures was analyzed. Meanwhile, according to the shape and structure of the vortex in slurry pump, the vortex can be divided into leading edge vortex, trailing edge vortex and gap leakage vortex by employing the Q criterion, and the generation mechanism of each vortex and relationship between vortex strength and flow condition were analyzed. What is more, the entropy generation theory was employed to study the energy loss of slurry pump. The pressure distribution and wear characteristics of different impeller structures under two-phase flow conditions are studied. The result shows that the energy loss caused by entropy production in the slurry pump can be declined by employing the splitter blades, which can restrain the flow separation at the impeller outlet. Thus, the impeller with splitter blades not only can reduce the energy loss of the slurry pump, but also enhance the wear characteristics of impeller under two-phase flow conditions. Finally, the result can provide the guidelines for the design optimization of slurry pump.

Introduction

Slurry pump as an important equipment for transporting coal, which are widely used in power plants, mines and other fossil energy field. Since the conveyed medium is solid-liquid two-phase flow, the wear characteristic and hydraulic performance of the slurry pump as the important influence factor. Therefore, a lot of investigations were carried out to improve the performance of slurry pump. Wang et al. (2021a) studied the influence of migration characteristics of particles on the flow and wear of the pump based on CFD-DEM coupling algorithm, they found that the intensity and scale of the vortex can be enhanced by increasing particle diameter. Abdolahnejad et al. (2021) studied the influence of slip factor variations on the head of centrifugal pumps, the Newtonian glass bead-water (GBW) and non-Newtonian kaolin water (KW) slurry flows were employed as the analysis medium, the result shows that decrement of slip factor for GBW is more severe than KW. Alawadhi et al. (2021) applied the response surface methodology to optimize the vane and blade geometry parameters of slurry pump. F. Khalil et al. (2013) investigated the impaction of pump performance under different concentrations of fluid. The influence of the solid concentration, specific gravity, and particle size on the head reduction was obtained. Kumar et al. (2014) studied the relationship between the slurry pump performance and the viscosity of conveying fluid by experiment. The result presents that with the decline of conveying fluid viscosity, the head and efficiency of slurry pump are continuously decrease