Modeling erosion in a centrifugal pump in an Eulerian-Lagrangian frame using OpenFOAM®

• Main Authors: Lopez Alejandro, Stickland Matthew, Dempster William
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: De Gruyter 2015-07-01
• Series: Open Engineering
• Subjects: erosion; solid particle impingement; centrifugal pumps
• Online Access: http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/eng.2015.5.issue-1/eng-2015-0037/eng-2015-0037.xml?format=INT

Erosion induced by solid particle impingement is a very commonwear mechanism in turbomachinery and Computational Fluid Dynamics is one of the most widely used tools for its prediction. In this article, erosion is modeled in one of the channels of a centrifugal pump using OpenFOAM®,which is an Open Source CFD package. A review of some of the most commonly used erosion models is carried out in an Eulerian-Lagrangian frame along with a comparative study of the erosion rates obtained with each model. Results yielded some disparities between models due to the different factors taken into consideration. The mesh is then deformed to obtain the resulting eroded geometry.