Pump design engineers face multiple challenges when creating new and better products. Pumps have to operate well over a range of conditions and run reliably over long lifetimes with minimal downtime for repairs. All pump manufacturers also need to meet more stringent government legislated efficiency requirements by 2020. Traditional design methods have relied heavily on testing physical prototypes. This can be expensive and time consuming, with multiple cycles of design/redesign and testing for each new product.
The solution:
For each pump design, the CFD simulation gives a full, three-dimensional representation of the flow and pressures within the pump housing. Alterations to the design, such as changes to the impeller, are easily assessed by changing the geometry: the software then automatically re-runs the analysis. Once the engineering team has three or four designs which yield acceptable digital prototype performance, they move on to building and testing their physical prototypes. Exploring the performance of numerous digital prototypes brings significant cost and time savings, enabling a high probability of success in a single phase of physical prototype testing, and ensuring a short development time window. Using this software for virtual testing has sped up Taco’s design workflow and reduced the costs associated with physical testing.
