Flow investigation in a centrifugal pump
From multiple medical studies on ventricular assist devices, thrombosis and haemolysis within centrifugal blood pumps have shown to be greatly affected by leakage flow characteristics. Leakage flow occurs within the clearance gap between impeller wall and volute wall of a centrifugal pump. Stagna...
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Format: | Final Year Project |
Language: | English |
Published: |
2016
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Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10356/67718 |
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Institution: | Nanyang Technological University |
Language: | English |
Summary: | From multiple medical studies on ventricular assist devices, thrombosis and
haemolysis within centrifugal blood pumps have shown to be greatly affected by
leakage flow characteristics. Leakage flow occurs within the clearance gap between
impeller wall and volute wall of a centrifugal pump. Stagnation of blood flow can
cause blood to clot while high blood flow rate accompanied by shearing can cause
blood to rupture. Leakage flow can also reduce the volumetric efficiency of a
centrifugal pump. These effects are undesirable and hence form the study motivation
for this project.
According to many researchers investigating flow patterns within ventricular assist
devices, it is difficult to measure the leakage flow rates in the clearance gap
experimentally. One of the many experimental methods to obtain leakage flow rates
is to drive back flow of fluid through a pump with dummy impeller using an
auxiliary pump. Then, a coupling method that uses differential pressure can
extrapolate total leakage flow rates for pump with real impeller. Thus, Computational
Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation was utilised in this study to validate results
obtained from the experimental dummy impeller method and investigate leakage
flow characteristics using a numerical approach.
CFD simulations were done for a miniature pump with 50mm diameter impeller. 80
cases were simulated in total and the variables include operating speed (1500rpm,
2000rpm), gap width (0.2mm, 0.3mm, 0.4mm, 0.5mm), and impeller type (real,
dummy). It was found that pump performance is better when gap width is decreased.
Total leakage flow rates increased with higher differential pressure across gap and
larger gap width. Total leakage flow rates obtained from experiments and CFD
simulation for both operating speeds have less than 10% difference on average,
except for gap width of 0.5mm. While within experimental and numerical errors,
pump with dummy impeller and CFD simulations were able to estimate total leakage
flow rates fairly well. |
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