Analysis of energy losses and head produced by a radial impeller using particle image velocimetry

Centrifugal pumps play a crucial role in industrial operations involving fluid transport. The quest for optimizing efficiency and reducing energy usage is a driving force behind research into their performance. The literature continues to offer opportunities for the creation of models that accurately depict the head generated by pumps, with a particular focus on impellers. The current pumps, however, are still far from being completely optimized. The idea of this paper is to conduct an analysis of energy losses and propose a mathematical expression to represent the head produced by a radial impeller, P23 model, working with water flow, considering that head is influenced by losses due to recirculation, shock/incidence, internal friction. The head losses are quantitatively evaluated from experimental data acquired via particle image velocimetry, which provides information on velocity vector direction and wall shear stress, both useful for the analysis. Our results reveal that the loss due to friction is the most significant, accounting for 40–90% of the total head loss, while shock and recirculation losses are restricted to 35% and 25%, respectively. Friction factors vary from 1.0 to 26 depending on the flow rate, as a result of wall shear stresses reaching up to 430 N/m², mainly influenced by pressure and pseudoforces. The head calculated through the new proposed expression is finally compared with the actual head generated by the impeller, measured via experiments dedicated to assess the pump performance. According to our results, the relative deviations between the calculated and measured heads are limited to 5%. Although our results have been validated for a single P23 impeller geometry, the methodology developed here can be extended to other impellers in the future. The results may thus represent a step forward for designing more efficient and power-saving pumps.