A Three-Dimensional Analysis Of Flow In Pump Intakes

For the flow in intakes of pump stations, it is easy to form vortices. This kind of vortices can cause flow rate reducing and structure vibration. Finally, the operation efficiency of the water pump is reduced. Being serious, it will also damage the building and threaten the safety of person. So it is necessary to study the flow in the pump intakes. Although studies on this flow is began early, but the interest is place on the hydraulic characteristic of the flow. There is less meticulous study that is directed against the vortex structures. Based on the model verification with experiments, this paper adopt the finite volume method to analyze the flow in the pump intakes numerically. The main conclusions are as follows:1) Numerical analysis of some flows, such flow in a pump intake with single intake pipe and flow over a WES spillway, by using standard k-ε model, RNG~k-ε model and low Reynolds k-ε model under default model parameters. It is shown that standard k-ε model and RNGk-ε model can give more accurate predictions of the vortex structures than the other two turbulence models and their predictions are agree well with experiments. The flow over the WES spillway is shown that numerical computation can not only predict the hydraulic characteristics of the flow, but also can predict the detail flow phenomenon correctly, such as vortex structures.2) On the basis of the thing that the numerical model is verified, use standard k-εmodel to simulate the flow in pump intakes with the double intake pipes. From such angles as velocity, streamline, vortice structure etc., the influence from the different interval of two intake pipes and from the different velocity in the two intake pipes is discussed. It is shown that changing the distance between the two intake pipes or changing the velocity within the two intake pipes can restrain a certain kind of vortex formulation, but at the same time encourage other kind of vortex formulation. So we should consider the function of every influence factor synthetically in engineering design of pump intakes.