The effect of wear ring clearance on flow field in the impeller sidewall gap and efficiency of a low specific speed centrifugal pump

In this paper, the flow in the impeller sidewall gap of a low specific speed centrifugal pump is analyzed to study the effect of wear ring clearance and the resultant through-flow on flow field in this cavity and investigate the overall efficiency of the pump. Centrifugal pumps are commonly subject to a reduction in the flow rate and volumetric efficiency due to abrasive liquids or working conditions, since the wear rings are progressively worn, the internal leakage flow is increased. In the new operating point, the overall efficiency of the pump cannot be predicted simply by using the pump characteristic curves. The flow field is simulated with the use of computational fluid dynamics and the three-dimensional full Navier–Stokes equations are solved using CFX software. In order to verify the numerical simulations, static pressure field in volute casing and pump performance curves are compared with the experimental measurements. The results show that, for the pump with minimum wear ring clearance, the disk friction efficiency is the strongest factor that impairs the overall efficiency. Therefore, when the ring clearance is enlarged more than three times, although volumetric efficiency decreases effectively but the reduction in overall efficiency is remarkably smaller due to improvement in the disk friction losses.