Slurry Pump Open Impeller

The impeller is one of the most important parts of centrifugal slurry pump. Depending on your application, impeller selection can be crucial to slurry pump performance. Slurry applications can be especially hard on the impeller of slurry pump because of their abrasive nature. In order for your process to operate efficiently and stand up to the test of time, you must choose the proper impeller for slurry pump. Open-impellers are utilized within radial flow centrifugal pumps. This type of impeller is very well suited to handling slurries and other liquids with a high amount of suspended bodies. The largest advantage with an open-impeller is that it does not block easily, as there are no areas with small clearances.

Centrifugal slurry pumps are commonly used to convey solid materials in many industries including the mining, power, and marine industries. The solid particles in the slurry frequently impact the pump inner wall resulting in significant wear of the flow passage. Frequent replacement of the pump components is not only expensive, but also wastes manpower and time. Therefore, many studies have sought to find optimal designs of slurry pumps that are efficient and have less wear. This study used Eulerian-Eulerian mixture model to simulate the solid-liquid two-phase flow of quartz sand and water in a slurry pump. The impeller was optimized statistically. Then, the original pump design and the optimized pump design were manufactured for a geometric similarity ratio of 1:0.408. The wear rates in the two slurry pumps were then measured by weight loss measurements. The tests show that the optimized pump has less wear, longer service life and meets the design goals which shows that this optimization method is effective.