A Study of Erosion–Cavitation Inception Synergy in Seawater Centrifugal Pumps

In pico-hydropower, the use of pumps as turbines is a cost-effective solution, especially for remote areas. The abundant seawater makes it a good fluid for pumped storage. The operation of centrifugal pumps in normal and reverse modes involves thickness loss because of solid particle concentration and vapor cavitation. Some research has been performed to predict cavitation in centrifugal pumps, but this issue still exists in several pico-hydropower plants. Therefore, to analyse the synergy between erosion and cavitation in a seawater centrifugal pump, we performed a CFD analysis to compute the effect of material mass loss due to erosion on cavitation risk. The Euler–Lagrangian method was used to track the released particles combined with the RNG k-ε turbulence model. The first part studied the effect of the surface mean roughness height (Ra) on the performance of the centrifugal pump. Increasing Ra from 0 to 15 μm decreases the pump hydraulic efficiency from 93% to 91%, respectively. The second analysis focused on the distribution of erosion thickness and its temporal evolution for 40 μm and 50 μm particles. For both the pump mode and the turbine mode, the erosion thickness is a polynomial function of power 2 with time. The most eroded regions are the blade leading edge (LE) and the blade trailing edge in pump and turbine mode, respectively. The last section focuses on analysing the effect of erosion thickness on cavitation damage. As the surface roughness increases, the cavitation damage power increases. The cavitation power risk increases from 111 kW to 156 kW in pump mode. In turbine mode, when the erosion thickness is between 0.0011 μm and 0.0022 μm, the cavitation damage is the same, approximately 170 kW, whereas the total gas distribution is uniformly distributed in the blade channel. With respect to seawater, the NPSHr increased compared with that with freshwater, from 3.35 m to 3.67 m.