Influence of Blade Thickness on Transient Flow Characteristics of Centrifugal Slurry Pump with Semi-open Impeller

As the critical component, the impellers of the slurry pumps usually have blades of a large thickness. The increasing excretion coefficient of the blades affects the flow in the impeller resulting in a relatively higher hydraulic loss, which is rarely reported. In order to investigate the influence of blade thickness on the transient flow characteristics of a centrifugal slurry pump with a semi-open impeller, transient numerical simulations were carried out on six impellers, of which the meridional blade thickness from the leading edge to trailing edge varied from 5-10 mm, 5-15 mm, 5-20 mm, 10-10 mm, 10-15 mm, and 10-20 mm, respectively. Then, two of the six impellers, namely cases 4 and 6, were manufactured and experimentally tested for hydraulic performance to verify the simulation results. Results of these tests agreed reasonably well with those of the numerical simulation. The results demonstrate that when blade thickness increases, pressure fluctuations at the outlet of the impeller become severe. Moreover, the standard deviation of the relative velocity in the middle portion of the suction sides of the blades decreases and that at the outlet of the impeller increases. Thus, the amplitude of the impeller head pulsation for each case increases. Meanwhile, the distribution of the time-averaged relative flow angle becomes less uniform and decreases at the outlet of the impeller. Hence, as the impeUer blade thickness increases, the pump head drops rapidly and the maximum efficiency point is offset to a lower flow rate condition. As the thickness of blade trailing edge increases by 10 mm, the head of the pump drops by approximately 5 m, which is approximately 10 % of the original pump head. Futhermore, it is for the first time that the time-averaged relative flow angle is being considered for the analysis of transient flow in centrifugal pump. The presented work could be a useful guideline in engineering practice when designing a centrifugal slurry pump with thick impeller blades.

Numerical Simulation of the Flow around Marine Propeller Series

The objective of marine propeller design optimization study is to obtain a propeller with minimum power absorption, maximum efficiency and good materials resistance. In this study, results of numerical simulation carried out on the flow around a conventional marine propeller are presented. The investigation focused on the aspects related to the influence of skew magnitude, thickness and blade number on the propeller performances. First, open water performances of a conventional propeller model DTMB 4148 was estimated using RANS （Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes） method. The flow around rotating propeller model was analyzed in the steady state using RANS approach of the commercial CFD （computational fluid dynamics） code fluent. The results provide good agreement with literature data. Numerical results show that the number of blades has an influence on the open water performances of marine propellers. It＇s noticed that the best propeller has four or five blades from only the hydrodynamic aspect. The thickness blade effect has been studied for the same propeller model and compared to the blade with three different thickness values. Results of the calculation show that the blade thickness increases moderately the propeller efficiency. Finally, numerical simulation is performed to study the magnitude skew effect on the propeller blade performance, so three different models were generated. The results of the simulation show that the skew distribution has a positive effect on the open water performances of the marine propellers.