Studying the Effect of Design Parameters on the Performance of a Rotary Sliding Vane Pump Using Computational Fluid Dynamics

Abstract

Thesis Summary A pump is a mechanical device that converts mechanical energy into hydraulic energy. The aim of the current work is to examine the behavior of fluid flow inside a rotary sliding vane pump and assessing the performance by studying the effect of change of the rotational speed, number of vanes and the radial clearance gap size between vane tips and stator surface on the performance of the pump. The commercial finite-volume solver ANSYS Fluent was used to build a 3D model of the pump and simulate the flow behavior in it with an additional C-language source code for the description of the dynamic mesh motion. Pump flow was studied using lubricating oil, 5W-30, as the working fluid. Several computational configurations were used for the numerical simulation. The numerical results showed that the increase of the number vanes from 4 to 8 decreases the overall efficiency by 46.5%, while increasing the clearance gap size from 0.025 mm to 0.075 mm decreases the overall efficiency by 17.6%.