Proceedings of the Twenty-first (2011) International Offshore and Polar Engineering Conference Maui, Hawaii, USA, June 19-24,

2011 Copyright 2011 by the International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers (ISOPE) ISBN 978-1-880653-96-8 (Set); ISSN 1098-6189 (Set); www.isope.org

A Numerical Study on the Performance of 2 Stage Mixed Flow Pump for Seawater Lifting
Young-Ju Kim, Nam-Sub Woo, Jae-Ki Kwon, So-Keul Chung, Eui-Seob Park, and Chi-Ho Yoon
Mineral Resources Research Division, Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources Daejeon, Korea

ABSTRACT
The seawater lift pump system is responsible for maintaining the open canal level to provide the suction flow of circulating water pump at the set point. The objective of this paper is to design a 2-stage mixed flow pump (for seawater lifting) by inverse design method and to evaluate the overall performance and the local flow fields of the pump by using a commercial CFD code. Rotating speed of the impeller is 1,750 rpm with the flow rate of 2,700 m3/h. Finite volume method with structured mesh and Realizable k- turbulent model is used to guaranty more accurate prediction of turbulent flow in the pump impeller. The numerical results such as static head, brake horse power and efficiency of the mixed flow pump are compared with the reference data. The calculated results are good agreement with the reference data less 3% error.

circuits to condense the expanded steam from the turbines. Because they require high reliability according to long-term use, high quality of design and production technology is essential in order to enter the market. Seawater lift pumps in the field of marine plants are required excellent performance and durability. As shown in Fig. 1, seawater lift pumps can be classified into 4 types.

KEY WORDS: Seawater lift pump, Mixed flow pump, FPSO, Total
head, Pump efficiency, Inverse design method

Horizontal

Vertical

INTRODUCTION
During the last 15 years there has been a rapid growth in the development of deepwater oil and gas fields in Gulf of Mexico, Brazil and West-Africa. So, the growth of floating production systems has led a corresponding growth in the related equipments market. Seawater lift pump and package is the one of the main equipment of the marine plants. On the other hand, marine plant industry has emerged as the next growth engine as an alternative market of the shipbuilding industry in Korea. But the most marine plant equipment have exclusive by the advanced foreign companies. The technologies and market of seawater lift pump also have been preempted by the advanced foreign companies. Because of their flexibility and long-term reliability, mixed-flow pumps are widely used for applications requiring high delivery rates against moderate heads. The main demand in all parts of the world is from the power generating sector, where mixed flow pumps are used in the cooling

Line shaft Submerged Fig. 1 Classification of seawater lift pump

South Korea is a world-class shipbuilding industry, however marine plant equipment industry has been relatively underdeveloped. Therefore, recently many research and development projects for marine plant and equipments in progress. Hwang et al. carried out the hydraulic design optimization and performance analysis of mixed flow pumps for water-jet marine vehicle propulsion using mean streamline analysis and 3D CFD code. Choi et al. have investigated the viscous flow field within the impeller of a centrifugal pump in order to determine the influence of the parameters such as the numerical schemes, the turbulence models

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