Using TURBOdesign Suite to Optimize the Efficiency and Cavitation of Franklin Electric’s High Speed Pumps

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.

Franklin Electric aimed to improve the efficiency and cavitation performance of their high specific speed pump range pump stage. The baseline design had already high efficiency and reasonable cavitation performance but the aim was to improve this further. But the key was to come up with a design quickly.

Fig. 1. The Ansys Workbench workflow used for optimization of the pump impeller.

In order to achieve this ambitious target, they used TURBOdesign LinkWB to optimize the impeller and then TURBOdesign Volute to design the volute for the optimized impeller. Gabriel Davila, Development Engineer at Franklin Electric, has been using TURBOdesign Suite and the 3D Inverse Design technology for a number of years and recently explored the coupling between TURBOdesign1 and Ansys CFX via Workbench integration in order to tackle such complex multi-objective and multi-point optimizations.

Fig. 2. Impeller Head versus Minimum Pressure for the DoE points computed by TURBOdesign LinkWB (blue) and also Conventional Optimization (grey).

Using TURBOdesign Suite for a number of years, Franklin Electric has been able to considerably improve their pump performances. Gabriel commented that:

“By using TURBOdesign within Ansys Workbench, we’ve been able to obtain CFD results on hundreds of impellers literally overnight. This software combination has allowed us to explore hydraulic parameters beyond typical boundaries and ultimately improved pump performance in significantly less time when compared to our traditional design process.”

 Franklin Electric is now looking at applying similar workflows to the design of multistage pumps. Read more by downloading the case study.