Impeller Design Using CAD Techniques and Conformal Mapping Method

Computerized pump design has become a standard practice in industry, and it is widely used for both new designs as well as for old pumps retrofit. Such a complex design code has been developed over the past decade by the author. However, any design method has to accept a set of hypotheses that neglect in the first design iteration the three-dimensional effects induced by the blade loading, as well as the viscous effects. As a result, an improved design can be achieved only by performing a full 3D flow analysis in the pump impeller, followed by a suitable correction of the blade geometry and/or the meridian geometry. This chapter presents a fully automated procedure for generating the inter-blade channel 3D geometry for centrifugal pump impeller, starting with the geometrical data provided by the quasi-3D code. This is why we developed an original procedure that successfully addresses all geometrical particularities of a centrifugal pump.