Turbulent flow and pressure fluctuation prediction of the impeller in an axial-flow pump based on LES

The Large Eddy Simulation method with sliding mesh technique has been used for analyzing the unsteady flow in an axial-flow pump at five different flow rates. The tip leakage flow in the tip-gap region and the pressure pulsations on the blade surface were examined. The results indicate that the agreement between predicted pump performance and experimental data was reasonably good. The dominate tip-leakage vortex(TLV) extended to the pressure side of the neighboring blade for all five investigated flow rates. As the flow rate increases from 0.7Qd to 1.2Qd, the angle between the dominate TLV and the blade reduced from 20 deg to 14 deg. The results also showed that the amplitude of pressure fluctuation on the near-tip zone of the blade surface increases as the flow rate farer from the design flow rate, especially on the pressure side of the blade. At the 0.7Qd operation condition, the pressure fluctuation amplitude of the monitoring point PP3 (at the near-tip zone on the pressure side of the blade close to the blade leading edge) was 8.5 times of the one at design flow rate, and the high-frequency(18f_r) pulsation occurred due to tip leakage vortex. When the flow rate was more than 1.0Qd, the pressure fluctuations of PP3 was dominated by the rotation frequency(f_r).