Effect of Blade Trailing Edge Angle on the Performance of a Centrifugal Pump Impeller

Centrifugal pump is one of the most widely used devices to transport fluids in industries and buildings. A lot of research has been carried out to make it more efficient. With the development of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), the parametric study of a centrifugal pump has become much easier and the complex internal flow can be well predicted to expedite the pump design procedure. The primary objective of this work is to analyse the effect of trailing edge angle of three twisted blades of a radial flow impeller on the hydraulic performance of an impeller using three-dimensional steadystate analysis with the help of commercial CFD software Ansys- 14.0. In this analysis, three impellers are modelled using Ansys BladeGen tool with different trailing edge angles 16, to 27degrees keeping the blade wrap angle constant. The calculations are performed only on the impeller. Three dimensional Navier-Stokes equations are numerically solved by adopting k turbulence model, using finite volume methods based CFD code. The results revealed that at design point the impeller head increases by 4% with an increase in blade trailing edge angle from 16 to 27 degrees. It is found that the input power also increases.