A numerical study on the acoustic characteristics of splitter type centrifugal impeller

스플리터형 원심형 임펠러의 소음 특성에 대한 연구

Centrifugal pump are widely used and the noise generated by these machines causes one of the most serious problems. In general, the centrifugal pump noise is often dominated by tones at BPF(blade passage frequency) and its higher harmonics. This is a consequence of the strong interaction between the flow discharged from the impeller and the cutoff in the casing. However, only a few researches have been carried out on predicting the noise because of the difficulty in obtaining detailed information about the flow field and casing effects on noise radiation. The objective of this study is to develop a prediction method for the unsteady flow field and the acoustic pressure field of a centrifugal pump, and to calculate the effects of small vanes that are attached in original impeller-splitter impeller. We assume that the impeller rotates with a constant angular velocity and the flow field around the impeller is incompressible and inviscid. So, a discrete vortex method(DVM) is used to model the centrifugal pump and to calculate the flow field. The force of each element on the blade is calculated by the unsteady Bernoulli equation. Lowson's method is used to predict the acoustic source. The splitter impeller changes the acoustic characteristics as well as performance. Two-splitter type impeller is good for acoustic characteristics.