Erosion in centrifugal pumps for transporting flows with dilute particles is a main pump failure problem in many engineering processes. A numerical model combining the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and Discrete Element Method (DEM) is applied to simulate erosion in a centrifugal pump. Different models of the liquid-solid inter-phase forces are implemented, and the particle-turbulence interaction is also defined. The inertial particles considered in this work are monodisperse and have finite size. The numerical results are validated by comparing the results with a series of experimental data. Then, the effects of particle volume fraction, size, and shape on the pump erosion are estimated in the simulations. The results demonstrate that severe erosive areas are located near the inlet and outlet of the pressure side of the impeller blade, the middle region of the blade, the corners of the shroud and hub of the impeller adjoining to the pressure side of the blade, and the volute near the pump tongue. Among these locations, the maximum erosion occurs near the inlet of the pressure side of the blade. Erosion mitigation occurs under the situation where more particles accumulate in the near-wall region of the eroded surface, forming a buffering layer. The relationship between the particle size and the erosion is nonlinear, and the 1 mm particle causes the maximum pump erosion. The sharp particles cause more severe erosion in the pump because both the frequency of particle-wall collisions and the impact angle increase with the increasing sharpness of the particle.

The objective of this paper is to experimentally and numerically investigate the transient cavitation flow during the startup process of mixed flow pump with emphasis on studying the influence of blade numbers. The transient cavitation simulation was studied based on the improved SST k–ω turbulence model and the Zwart cavitation model. Firstly, in order to obtain the relationship between transient flow rate and the variation of rotational speed at startup, a theoretical analysis based on the fast transients of centrifugal pump was first applied to mixed flow pump and was verified by the current experiment study. Subsequently, the influence of blade number on the cavitation flow in the startup was studied. It is found that the transient cavitation could be classified into four stages regardless of the number of blades: no cavitation stage, the cavitation growth stage, the cavitation reduction stage and the cavitation stabilization stage. However, the blade number does have an impact on the spatial-temporal evolution of cavitation. More specifically, when the blade number increases, the initial cavitation appeared lately, the coverage area of the triangular cavitation cloud and sheet cavitation both decreased, and the increase in blade number has a better inhibitory effect on the sheet cavitation at the cavitation growth stage, and can make sheet cavitation disappear more quickly at the cavitation reduction stage.