Special Issue Article

Advances in Mechanical Engineering

2017, Vol. 9(7) 1–8
Ó The Author(s) 2017
Numerical investigations on effect of DOI: 10.1177/1687814017704155
journals.sagepub.com/home/ade
wear-ring clearance on performance of
a submersible well pump

Weidong Shi1, Xiongfa Gao1, Qihua Zhang1, Desheng Zhang1 and

Daoxing Ye2

Abstract
A typical submersible well pump was investigated in this article. The whole flow field of submersible well pump was
numerically simulated by computational fluid dynamics software. The influence of clearance of wear-rings on the external
characteristic and internal flow field was analyzed through comparing the calculation results with experimental results.
The result of the numerical simulation shows that changing clearance of front wear-ring has a greater impact on pump
performances than changing clearance of back wear-ring, and the head and efficiency of pump decrease with the increase
in the size of clearance. Especially when the size of clearance is larger than 0.5 mm, decreasing becomes more obvious.
When the front and back wear-ring size of the clearance comes to 1.0 mm, the efficiency decreases from the highest
point of 75.31% to 65.44% at rated flow, and the head of pump decreases about 3.5 m. When the size of clearance is
0.2 mm, reverse-flow will appear in the front shroud cavity of the impeller, and leakage from back wear-ring through the
balance hole into the impeller, which has a little influence on the flow field of the impeller inlet.

Keywords
Submersible well pump, wear-ring of impeller, clearance, numerical simulation, leakage

Date received: 9 August 2016; accepted: 10 March 2017

Academic Editor: Ramoshweu Lebelo

Introduction difficult.4–6 The submersible well pump works in a lim-

ited space; the experimental method is used to obtain
Submersible well pumps are the main equipments to the flow characteristics of the wear-ring, which requires
extract groundwater, which are widely used in rural high-quality equipment and high cost; and it is difficult
areas, factories, mines, tap-water company, geological
exploration, oil, and other geothermal fields. The gap
between the wear-rings of impeller of submersible well 1
Research Center of Fluid Machinery Engineering and Technology, Jiangsu
pump has great influence on the performance of the University, Zhenjiang, China
2
pump, and the size of the gap directly affects the effi- Key Laboratory of Fluid and Power Machinery, Ministry of Education,
Xihua University, Chengdu, China
ciency and head of the pump.1–3 There is a clearance
between static ring installed in the pump body and Corresponding authors:
rotated ring in the impeller shroud; the existence of the Xiongfa Gao, Research Center of Fluid Machinery Engineering and
clearance not only produce a volume loss but also dis- Technology, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, China.
turb the flow field structure inside the impeller channel, Email: gaofangjia@ujs.edu.cn
so as to affect the overall performance of the submersi- Daoxing Ye, Key Laboratory of Fluid and Power Machinery, Ministry of
ble well pump. But the clearance between the wear-rings Education, Xihua University, Chengdu 610039, China.
is small, and the flow is complex, so the research is Email: dxingye@163.com

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2 Advances in Mechanical Engineering

to obtain the flow characteristics of the balance hole This article presents a simulation based on a compu-
area with the experimental method.7–9 tational domain including front and back wear-ring
Baskharone10 used computational fluid dynamics gaps, inter-stage clearance, and gains the simulation
(CFD) methods to simulate the leakage flow and study results by changing front wear-ring gap or back wear-
its influence on the internal clearance leakage ring gap, compares and analyzes the numerical
flow of multistage pump, and compared with the exist- simulation results with the test results, and explores the
ing impeller leakage model. A research method by influence of deference size of wear-ring gap on charac-
Li et al.11 to carry out the hydraulic performance teristics and inner flow field.
through changing the size of wear-ring clearance by
test, and the effect of different wear-ring gaps on the
performance through changing the viscosity of oil, was Physical model and numerical method
studied. A labyrinth wear-ring was used for numerical Physical model
simulation by Hirano et al.,12 which analyzed the influ-
The type of pump model in this article is 200QJ80-22
ence of the wear-ring clearance leakage and flow on
with two stages as shown in Figure 1(a), for which the
force of impeller.
rated flow is 80 m3/h, rated head is 22 m, rated speed is

Figure 1. 2D (a) assembly drawing and (b) structural grids.

Shi et al. 3

2850 r/min, impeller diameter is 124 mm, impeller inlet

diameter is 79 mm, the impeller shroud diameter at
wear-ring clearance is 89.7 mm, outlet angle is 25°, and
the number of blades is 6.
The main reason of the wear-ring gap flow is that
there is a pressure difference between the inlet and out-
let of the gap. In addition to the liquid that has a cer-
tain viscosity, the impeller does rotary motion, so it will
form a shear flow in circumferential direction.

Numerical model
In this article, the three-dimensional (3D) modeling of Figure 2. Test ring of submersible well pump.
the inlet section, the impeller, the space guide vane, the
front and back sealing rings, the clearance, and the out- Figure 7. A turbine flowmeter was used to measure the
let section is carried out through the Pro/E software flow Q and the precision of turbine flowmeter is
platform. The whole mesh generation process was car- 6 0.3%. Speed n is measured by a tachometer
ried out in the ICEM 13.0 software, and the two-stage (PROVA RM-1500, Taiwan). During the experiment,
whole flow field was meshed with structural grid. The only one dynamic pressure transmitter (CYG1401) was
sketch of the impeller-structured mesh is shown in used to measure the outlet pressure. The precision of
Figure 1(b). In this study, the grid sizes are less than CYG1401 is 6 0.2%.
2.0 or the grid numbers are large than 3.12 3 106. The overall measurement uncertainty is calculated
Figure 1 gives a general view of the model pump 2D by the square root of the sum of the squares of the sys-
assembly drawing and the mesh in the impeller.13,14 tematic and random uncertainties,16 and the calculated
The rotating part and the stationary part with the result of expanded uncertainty of efficiency is 0.5%.
multi-reference frame model in FLUENT software In the pump performance test, pump efficiency was
were based on CFD platform. The channel flow field normally defined as follows
was set as 3D incompressible steady viscous flow, using
standard k 2 e two-equation turbulence model. rgQH
SIMPLE algorithm was used for the pressure and velo- h= 3 100% ð1Þ
PS
city coupling. Turbulence flow near the wall is treated
as the standard wall condition. The velocity at the inlet where h is the pump efficiency, Q is the rated flow
of the first impeller is set to be irrotational, the center (m3/s), H is the head of the pump (m), and Ps is the
section of the inlet pressure is set as the reference point output power of the motor (W)
of pressure, and the relative pressure is 0; the outflow is
set as free flow. It is assumed that the solid wall is Pout  Pin
H= ð2Þ
no-slip, which means the velocity in different directions rg
on the wall is 0. The convergence accuracy is 1025, and
the rotational speed is 2850 r/min.14 where Pin is the inlet total pressure and Pout is the outlet
total pressure (the Pin and Pout unit is Pa).
The test results were compared with the results of
Test results numerical simulation. The gap values used in simula-
The experimental study of the model is able to not only tion are in agreement with the test pump. The results
verify the reliability of CFD numerical calculation but are shown in Figure 3.
also analyze the difference in the performance of differ- Figure 3 showed the comparison between the numer-
ent clearances. So, the prototype model was manufac- ical results and the test results. As can be seen from
tured and all the sizes of clearance are 0.50 mm, and Figure 3, the numerical results are consistent with the
tested by test rig shown in Figure 2. Experiments were changing trends of experimental data. The numerical
done in an open-type pump system, which have the results are higher than the test results, and the main
identification from Jiangsu Province of China. The test result is that the numerical calculation does not take
rig is composed of two parts, namely, the data acquisi- into account the mechanical loss of the bearing and the
tion system and the water circulation system.15 The volume loss caused by seal gap leakage, making the
data acquisition system changes all kinds of physical numerical value of the head and efficiency higher than
quantities at different conditions, while the water circu- the test value. In general, the comparison of numerical
lation system supplies the necessary environment for results with the experimental results shows the accuracy
submersible well pump. The test rig is shown in and feasibility of the numerical calculation.
4 Advances in Mechanical Engineering

0.2 mm, the size of b2 increased from 0.2 to 1.0 mm,

the efficiency dropped by about 7 percentage points,
and the head reduced to 2.6 m. When the value of b2 is
0.2 mm, the efficiency decreased by 8 percentage points
and the head reduced 2.9 m with the value of b1
increasing from 0.2 to 1.0 mm. Compared to the previ-
ous two conditions, when the value of both b1 and b2
increased from 0.2 to 1.0 mm at the same time, the effi-
ciency and head decreased more significantly, the effi-
ciency decreased from 75.31% to 65.44%, and the head
reduced from 24.7 to 21.2 m.
It can be clearly seen from the figure that when the
value of the wear-ring clearance is between 0.2 and
0.5 mm, efficiency and head have a smaller downward
Figure 3. Comparison of numerical and test results. trend; while the value is greater than 0.5 mm, efficiency
and head are in a sharp decline. Because when the
wear-ring clearance increases to a certain degree, larger
volume will result in a drop in the performance, larger
Calculation result
leakage flow impacts the inlet area of the impeller and
The performance of the whole pump is closely related balances the hole area of the impeller channel, the flow
to the size of the seal-ring clearance of impeller shroud, field of these area is disordered, and the hydraulic loss
and its influence is mainly manifested in the external increases. So, the efficiency decreased significantly with
characteristics and the inner flow field, so it is very the larger sizes of the wear-ring clearance. From the
important to analyze the external characteristics and numerical results, the effect of change in the sizes of the
the inner flow field of the whole pump. In this article, front wear-ring clearance on the efficiency and head is
there are five kinds of clearance values of impeller greater than the change in the sizes of the back wear-
shroud wear-ring which are selected to calculation by ring clearance.
CFD, and the five kinds of clearance values are 0.2, Figure 5 shows the results of efficiency and head
0.35, 0.50, 0.70, and 0.10 mm, respectively. And the size under different clearance values of both b1 and b2 at
of inter-stage clearance remains constant throughout different design conditions. It can be clearly seen from
the numerical simulation (‘‘b1’’ represents the wear-ring Figure 5 that the smaller the clearance sizes, the higher
clearance of the impeller front shroud, and ‘‘b2’’ repre- the efficiency and head of the pump; it can also be seen
sents the wear-ring clearance of the impeller back from Figure 5(a) that the maximum efficiency point of
shroud). the pump shifts to the small flow rated point, probably
The influence of the change in the front wear-ring in the 70–75 m3/h flow to reach the maximum value.
clearance and the back wear-ring clearance on the per- And Figure 5(b) shows that in the small flow condition,
formance at the design conditions is shown in Figure 2. the head goes down gently when the wear-ring clear-
As can be seen from Figure 4, when the size of b1 is ance value increases from 0.2 to 0.5 mm.

Figure 4. Relative changes in (a) head and (b) efficiencies in different clearances at rated flow.
Shi et al. 5

Figure 5. Comparison of performance characteristic under different clearances: (a) pump efficiency and (b) head.

Figure 6. 2D streamline distribution in area of front wear-ring of first stage at rated flow.

Flow field flow did not have a greater impact on the impeller inlet,
and the second impeller front wear-ring clearance area
Front wear-ring clearance area flow field is also the case. With the increase in gap sizes, the resis-
Changes in the wear-ring clearance will affect the inter- tance by the wear-ring clearance to flow from the front
nal flow field of the pump. Therefore, in order to impeller shroud cavity into the impeller inlet is reduced.
explore the internal flow field by changing wear-ring The reverse-flow in the front impeller shroud cavity gra-
clearance sizes, take the flow field of the impeller as the dually disappears. In the front impeller shroud cavity
research object in this article and take the front wear- was basically no reverse-flow when clearance value up
ring flow field area to analyze the design condition. to 0.7 mm, but the more flow through the front wear-
The streamlined distribution of the first and second ring clearance back to the impeller inlet, instead, the
wear-ring clearance regions is, respectively, shown in large leaks have a great impact on the impeller inlet so
Figures 6 and 7; it can be seen clearly from the chart that the hydraulic loss and volume loss is more serious.
that the flow in the front impeller shroud cavity gener- Larger clearance leakage made the flow field of impeller
ates a rotary motion when the clearance is 0.2 mm. disorderly, and the hydraulic efficiency and the volume
Impeller exit near the front impeller shroud cavity area efficiency were decreased, so as to decrease the effi-
also has a reverse-flow. Due to the outflow from the ciency and the head of the pump.
impeller of high-pressure water flow into the pump cav- Figures 8 and 9 show the static pressure contour dis-
ity, the front wear-ring clearance is smaller, and the tribution in the area of front wear-ring of first stage
leakage of liquid is greatly hindered. So, the front and second stage at rated flow, respectively. From the
impeller shroud cavity is full of reflux, but the loss has figure, we can clearly observe the pressure changes in
no effect on the main flow of the pump. Smaller leakage the clearance areas with clearance sizes increasing. The
6 Advances in Mechanical Engineering

Figure 7. 2D streamline distribution in the area of front wear-ring of second stage at rated flow.

Figure 8. Static pressure distribution in the area of front wear-ring of first stage at rated flow.

Figure 9. Static pressure distribution in area of front wear-ring of second stage at rated flow.

greater the clearance size, the more obvious the pres- outlet area of clearance, high pressure is spreading
sure gradient in the clearance. The low pressure zone in out as the clearance sizes increasing, in this case, not
the guide vane cavity outward diffusion, and in the only the volume loss is serious, but also affects the
Shi et al. 7

Figure 10. Comparison of balance hole area static pressure under different back wear-ring clearances at rated flow: (a) first stage
and (b) second stage.

pressure uniform distribution of the flow field inside the leakage through the balance hole has less impact on
the impeller. In the range of machining, smaller clear- the flow field of the impeller inlet and has few hydraulic
ance sizes are better, because the smaller clearance sizes losses. The leakage increased with the increasing sizes
can reduce the hydraulic loss and volume loss, so as to of wear-ring clearance; the flow through the balance
improve the performance of the pump. hole has a greater impact on flow field of the impeller
back shroud, and the flow field inside the impeller is
Balance hole area flow field disordered and has great hydraulic loss. Larger leakage
volume also led to increased volume loss, and the effi-
In order to balance the axial force of the impeller, the ciency and head also decreased significantly. The results
impeller back shroud has balance holes generally. And shown in Figure 10 are consistent with the results
the leakage from the balance hole will cause the flow shown in Figure 4. Therefore, it is very important to
field of impeller inlet to disorder and increase the strictly control the sizes of the clearance for the inner
hydraulic loss. Figure 10 shows the comparative analy- flow field structure and the optimum design of hydrau-
sis of static pressure contour in the balance hole area, lic performance.
where the clearance values of both impeller front
shroud and inter-stage clearance are 0.2 mm, and the
Conclusion
clearance values of back shroud are 0.20, 0.35, 0.50,
0.70, and 1.00 mm, respectively. The numerical results are consistent with the experi-
It can be seen from Figure 10 that when the size mental results. The numerical calculation does not take
clearance of impeller back shroud is 0.2 and 0.35 mm, into account the mechanical loss and the volume loss,
8 Advances in Mechanical Engineering

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