Technical Paper
Design Optimization of Centrifugal Pump Using CFD Simulations, Metamodeling and Bayesian Inference
2022-03-29
2022-01-0787
Computational expenses aside, simulating and optimizing pumps operating at pressures near the liquid’s saturation pressure needs complete modeling of cavitation physics. This becomes critical in high-temperature applications since the saturation pressure increases with temperature and the pumps become more prone to cavitation. In the present work, the performance of a centrifugal pump was improved by delaying the sudden onset of cavitation at higher flow rates through constrained optimization of impeller geometry. The optimized designs generated over 25% higher head at the operating point and performed better than the baseline design across the range of operation. Constraints were dictated by geometric/ packaging limitations in order to ensure that the optimized impeller can be retrofitted into an existing fluid-power system. A Gaussian Process Regressor (GPR) based metamodel was constructed utilizing a database of designs generated through Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS).