Effects of Volute Cross-Sectional Area Distribution on Performance of Double-Suction Volute Pump

The following study describes the optimization design procedure of a double-suction pump. BASELINE pump is designed as inlet nozzle diameter 800 mm and impeller outlet diameter 740 mm. Each component of a BASELINE pump, impeller configurations, discharge volute, and the suction casing were determined by DOE (Design of Experiments) and sensitivity analysis. However, finite selected design parameters for each component are mostly restricted to the free surface design of the pump casing. In this study, the optimization method approach along with steady Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is introduced to achieve the high efficiency request of a double-suction pump. To investigate the matching optimization of the impeller and discharge volute at design point, the full parametric geometry of discharge volute was developed referred to the BASELINE shape and Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm NSGA-II (Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II) was used. Optimization result shows that by increasing the volute cross-sectional area from the volute tongue till the circumferential angle 180 deg. provides lower loss. This is due to the improvement achieved for the better distribution of the velocity gradient within the volute. A validated unsteady computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was also employed to investigate the performance difference between optimized volute design and the BASELINE which correlated to the pressure fluctuation and secondary flow behavior inside the cross-sections from 80% to 120% of nominal flow rate. The result shows that the flow distortion in the streamwise direction is stronger with the BASELINE and sensitively affects the operation stability. This is due to the different secondary flow pattern in the cross-sections, hence demonstrating a design direction of desired volute cross-sectional shape for high-performance can be used in a double-suction volute pump.