Numerical simulation of multi-dimensional flows in a gear pump : a thesis

Abstract

FLUENT, commercial CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics)software is used for the flow analysis of an external gear pump. This study is an extension of the previous work of FLUENT analyses of gear pumps, which has been conducted at Youngstown State University for the last two years.

The main objective of this study is to improve the computational fluid dynamics analysis of the gear pump by developing improved 2-D models and an initial 3-D model. A comprehensive analysis is performed for the 2-D flow with models having smaller gaps between gears. A case study of 3-D flow analysis is conducted on a 2.5-D model that is created from the 2-D model. The 3-D analysis is performed on supercomputer in a mode of remote parallel processing. It is important to predict the fluid flow parameters such as pressure, velocity, turbulence in order to improve pump performance. These parameters are analyzed under various operating conditions such as different speeds and outlet pressures to investigate the effect of each parameter on the performance of the pump. The numerical outputs from the 2-D and 3-D analyses are compared with theoretical values. The results are consistent and reasonable.

The information contained in this thesis may help those who would like to conducted 3-D flow simulation of gear pump in the future.