Numerical and experimental investigations on cavitation characteristics of inducer and impeller combination fuel pumps

The aviation fuel pump is a significant accessory for aircraft fuel system. Cavitation resistance is very important for aviation fuel pumps. However, most of the current optimization work for centrifugal pumps only focuses on hydraulic efficiency, which may lead to poor cavitation performance. Therefore, it is necessary to explore effective solutions to improve the cavitation performance of the pump without reducing the efficiency of the pump. To enhance the anti-cavitation capability of the pump and reduce hydraulic loss, the paper try to combine the inducer and impeller. Simulations and external characteristics experiments are carried out. Static pressure and the vapor volume fraction distributions on the inducer and the impeller of the pump under various operation conditions are obtained. At the same time, the curves for the drops of the head coefficients obtained from experiments and calculations are also quantitatively compared, which shows that the numerical simulation of the cavitation performance of the fuel pump is in good agreement with the experimental results. The maximum error of both simulation and experiment is less than 6%, which is within the allowable error range. It indicates that the numerical calculation method adopted can better predict the cavitation performance of the fuel pump.