Cavitation Intensity Measurement by Analysis of Pump Structure Oscillation- A New Parametric Method Approach

One of the sources of instability in a centrifugal pump is cavitation phenomenon. Cavitation within a centrifugal pump can cause more undesirable effects, such as deterioration of the hydraulic performance (drop in headcapacity and efficiency curves), damage of the pump by pitting and erosion and structure vibration and resulting noise. Cavitation can appear within the entire range of operating conditions; therefore cavitation occurrence inside a pump and its intensity must, by all means, be identified. An average energy method for quantifying cavitation intensity has been developed. This is called the Logarithmic Cavitation Intensity (LCI). To establish the pump cavitation conditions, a statistical analysis has been undertaken in a real-time and a 1000-cycle LCI mean has been recommended as a proper criterion for defining the cavitation intensity. The results also show this method is capable of detecting cavitation by simple hardware with low sampling frequency resulting in reducing the computational time as well as hardware complexity and cost.

Cavitation Intensity Measurement by Analysis of Pump Structure Oscillation- A New Parametric Method Approach Keywords:

Cavitation , Pump , Laser Velocity Probes , Vibration Analysis