Comparison of cavitation prediction for a centrifugal pump with or without volute casing

Cavitation may not only cause head and efficiency breakdown of hydraulic machines but also generate other unfavorable phenomena such as noise and vibration. Therefore, the accurate prediction of cavitation development is important for various pump applications. In this paper, two numerical models, namely, models A and B, are applied to simulate the turbulent cavitating flows inside a centrifugal pump to investigate the effect of calculation domain on the prediction accuracy of cavitation performance for hydraulic machines. Model A has a calculation domain with volute casing, whereas model B has a single blade-to-blade flow passage without volute casing. Steady simulations of cavitating flow in the pump have been conducted based on the shear stress transport k-ω turbulence model and the homogeneous cavitation model. Both models A and B predicted that the pump performance decreases with decreasing cavitation number. Experimental results show that model B can predict better the critical cavitation number at the best efficiency point compared with model A, which is the full flow passage model. Internal flow investigations indicate that an asymmetrical feature of cavitating flow exists when the calculation domain with volute casing is applied. The asymmetrical cavitation development in different blade-to-blade flow passages for model A results in an over-estimation of the decrease in pump performance because of the interaction between the impeller blade and the tongue of the volute casing. A simple calculation domain without volute casing is preferred for steady cavitation prediction in pumps rather than the full flow passage with volute casing because the former has better convergence, less resource requirements, and lower time consumption.