There are a large number of fouling organisms in the ocean, which easily attach to the surface of ships, oil platforms and breeding facilities, corrode the surface of equipment, accelerate the aging of equipment, affect the stability and safety of marine facilities and cause serious economic losses. Antifouling coating is an effective method to prevent marine biological fouling. Traditional organic tin and copper oxide coatings are toxic and will contaminate seawater and destroy marine ecology and have been banned or restricted. Environmentally friendly antifouling coatings have become a research hotspot. Among them, the use of natural biological products with antifouling activity as antifouling agents is an important research direction. In addition, some fouling release coatings without antifoulants, biomimetic coatings, photocatalytic coatings and other novel antifouling coatings have also developed rapidly. On the basis of revealing the mechanism of marine biofouling, this paper reviews the latest research strategies to develop environmentally friendly marine antifouling coatings. The composition, antifouling characteristics, antifouling mechanism and effects of various coatings were analyzed emphatically. Finally, the development prospects and future development directions of marine antifouling coatings are forecasted.

Vortex pumps play a crucial role in industrial and municipal settings by transferring high-viscosity and particle-laden fluids. However, their performance and reliability are significantly compromised by cavitation. Identifying and diagnosing cavitation promptly is essential for maintaining the proper operation of vortex pumps. The use of current signals as a non-invasive monitoring method has shown great promise in detecting multi-cavitation states. The proposed method integrates dual-tree complex wavelet transform with variational mode decomposition to decompose current signals into multiple modes. Subsequently, the Bayesian optimized locally weighted K-nearest neighbor algorithm is employed to accurately identify multi-cavitation states. High-speed photography is also utilized to observe the incipient, developing, and collapsing phases of cavitation. The results indicate that the proposed method achieves a detection accuracy of 96.67% at a flow rate of 40 m³/h, outperforming other flow conditions. The recognition accuracy reaches 98.33% under stable flow conditions, while accuracies of 92.33% and 93.67% are observed for flow rates of 35 m³/h and 45 m³/h, respectively. The overall average recognition rate across all tested flow conditions is 94.22%. This methodology not only demonstrates high effectiveness in identifying cavitation states but also offers a reliable and practical solution for fault diagnosis in fluid mechanical systems. It significantly contributes to the improvement of operational efficiency, reliability, and maintenance strategies in industrial and municipal pumping systems.

Multistage centrifugal pumps are highly efficient and compact in structure. Pump efficiency can be improved by an effective understanding of hydraulic behavior and energy loss, however, the traditional hydraulic loss evaluation method does not readily reveal the specific locations of energy loss in the pump. In this study, a guide ring was imposed in multistage pumps, and an entropy production theory was applied to investigate irreversible energy loss of a multistage pump with and without guide ring. Detailed distributions of energy losses in the pumps were calculated to determine the respective entropy production rates (EPRs). The EPR values as calculated are in close accordance with actual hydraulic loss values in the pumps. EPR values were higher in the multistage pump with the guide ring than the pump without a guide ring under part-load flow conditions (0.2Qd). However, the vortex flow in the pump was weakened (or eliminated) by the guide ring as flow rate increased; this reduced energy loss in the chambers. Flow passing the chamber was stabilized by the guide ring, which decreased shock and vortex loss in the chamber and guide vane. Under both designed flow condition and overload conditions, the EPR values of the guide ring-equipped multistage pump were lower than those without the guide ring. Furthermore, minimum efficiency index (MEI) values were also calculated for the two chamber structures; it was found that overall efficiency of pump with guide ring is better than that without.

Cavitation has a significant effect on the flow fields and structural behaviors of a centrifugal pump. In this study, the unsteady flow and structural behaviors of a centrifugal pump are investigated numerically under different cavitation conditions. A strong two-way coupling fluid-structure interaction simulation is applied to obtain interior views of the effects of cavitating bubbles on the flow and structural dynamics of a pump. The renormalization-group k-ε turbulence model and the Zwart–Gerbe–Belamri cavitation model are solved for the fluid side, while a transient structural dynamic analysis is employed for the structure side. The different cavitation states are mapped in the head-net positive suction head (H-NPSH) curves and flow field features inside the impeller are fully revealed. Results indicate that cavitating bubbles grow and expand rapidly with decreasing NPSH. In addition, the pressure fluctuations, both in the impeller and volute, are quantitatively analyzed and associated with the cavitation states. It is shown that influence of the cavitation on the flow field is critical, specifically in the super-cavitation state. The effect of cavitation on the unsteady radial force and blade loads is also discussed. The results indicate that the averaged radial force increased from 8.5 N to 54.4 N in the transition progress from an onset cavitation state to a super-cavitation state. Furthermore, the structural behaviors, including blade deformation, stress, and natural frequencies, corresponding to the cavitation states are discussed. A large volume of cavitating bubbles weakens the fluid forces on the blade and decreases the natural frequencies of the rotor system. This study could enhance the understanding of the effects of cavitation on pump flow and structural behaviors.