Optimizing the Efficiency and Cavitation Performance of High Speed Pumps

A Case Study by Franklin Electric

 In October 2018, Advanced Design Technology and Ansys held a joint webinar to showcase the advantages of TURBOdesign LinkWB for design optimization of turbomachinery. In this webinar Gabriel Davila from Franklin Electric presented a case study on the application of TURBOdesign LinkWB for a pump impeller optimization to improve efficiency and reduce cavitation.

Franklin Electric is a global leader in the manufacturing and distribution of products and systems focused on the movement and management of water and fuel. They offer pumps, motors, drives, and controls for use in a wide variety of residential, commercial, agricultural, industrial, and municipal applications.

Using TURBOdesign Suite to Optimize Pump Performance

Franklin Electric has been using TURBOdesign Suite for a number of years. In that time they have been able to considerably improve their pump performances. In this instance, Franklin Electric aimed to improve the efficiency and cavitation performance of their high specific speed pump range pump stage. The baseline design already had high efficiency and reasonable cavitation performance, but the aim was to improve this further. Most importantly, they wanted to come up with a design quickly.

Not only was TURBOdesign1  able to produce the entire workflow for each design in minutes, its inverse design optimization capabilities produced an impeller head very close to target value. Thanks to this, an accurate surrogate model could be established and used to select three impeller geometries for further evaluation.

The case study addresses the key issues of the project, including:

• The advantages of using 3D inverse design code TURBOdesign1 for pump blade design and optimization;
• Using TURBOdesign Volute to design the volute for the optimized impeller;
• How TURBOdesign1 can be directly linked to external CFD/FEA and optimization tools such as Ansys Workbench and CFX;
• How TURBOdesign1 eliminates the need for expensive two-phase flow analysis for each design.