Part load instability and rotating stall in a multistage low specific speed pump

A new diffuser design is developed for a low specific speed, multistage pump. In this design the diffuser and the de-swirl vanes are integrated into single vanes. This creates diffuser channels that extend from behind the impeller exit through the cross-over, up to the eye of the next stage impeller. Experiments show the occurrence of a saddle type instability in the head curve. At a critical flow rate of close to 50% of the flow rate at Best Efficiency Point (BEP), the head drops by 7% of the head at BEP. In this study Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) are used in an effort to understand the underlying flow phenomena. The head curve that is obtained with the transient CFD simulations contains a saddle type instability at a flow rate that is approximately the same as in the experiments, but with a lower magnitude. At flow rates higher than the critical flow rate, the predicted head and power are in very good agreement with the experimental data. At flow rates lower than the critical flow rate, the head and power are slightly over-predicted. An analysis of the pressure distribution in the pump reveals that the head loss at different flow rates in the diffuser shows a discontinuity at the critical flow rate. Since both the impeller head and the head loss in the vaneless gap increase continuously for decreasing flow rate, this is an indication that the cause of the head instability lies in the diffuser. Moreover, a strong increase in the variability of head and power at flow rates below the critical flow suggests that the phenomenon is unsteady. Flow patterns in the impeller and in the diffuser, as calculated by CFD, show a high degree of periodicity and are very similar for flow rates down to the critical flow rate. However, for lower flow rates the flow pattern changes completely. A single rotating stall cell is observed that causes two or three neighboring diffuser channels to stall, leading to a significantly lower flow rate or even a reversed flow. This stall pattern rotates in the direction of impeller rotation at a very low frequency of approximately 3.3% of the impeller rotation frequency.