The importance of the knowledge of flow stream in water sump pump

Abstract

Numerous different experimental and numerical methods have been developed and are already improved in order to get rather good flow descriptions inside pump components. These calculations are generally realized assuming uniform and steady flow conditions, in particular for the inlet conditions. However, few studies are devoted to non-uniform upstream conditions, especially in case of water pump sump before entering the pump inlet tube. Free air-core vortex occurring at the water-intake pipe is an important problem encountered in hydraulic engineering because they reduce pump performances and may have large effects on the operating conditions. The paper deals with flow pattern inside sump pump. Experiments were conducted in order to select best positions of the suction pipe of water-intake specific configurations. The numerical studies try to reproduce the flow pattern of these experiments and confirm the influence of geometrical parameters on the flow structure in such a sump. These numerical studies points out the need of unsteady calculation in order to get a better understanding of flow behaviour including two-phases flow models.