Improving the Cooling Process of Heavy-Duty Engines through Three Dimensional Simulation of Fluid Flow in its Coolant Centrifugal Pump

To extract optimum cooling trends in a heavy duty engine, the 3D flow in a centrifugal pump from the Detroit Diesel company was numerically simulated. For this aim, a computational fluid dynamic model is developed using ANSYS CFX for a wide span of flow rates and a number of shaft angular velocities. The variation of constituting parameters are examined using dimension-less descriptive parameters of flow, head and power coefficients, finally, the efficiency of the pump is examined. In this analysis, ( ) turbulent model is employed which is a combination of two different models for pumps and turbomachines. The characteristic curves of the pump are derived by analyzing the velocity and pressure profile of the coolant (water). This provides a new conceptual relations from graphs and useful evaluation of the pump performance at all working conditions. Moreover, engineering and design interpretations from the evolution of the characteristic curves are provided to better engine performance. Numerical results show that prolonged cooling duty cycles of the vehicle should accompany a flow factor of 10%. In addition, the peak of the vehicle’s loading should match the maximum efficiency of the pump that can be increased to 62% by augmentation of flow rate and flow coefficient.