Undesired air entrainment by vortex formation - experimental investigations on the resulting phase fraction distributions in a centrifugal pump using gamma-ray computed tomography

Air entrainment may occur in situations, where water is conveyed from a reservoir. There hollow vortices may form as a consequence of low liquid level and pre-existing fluid swirling. Particularly, such a situation may be prevailing in nuclear power plants, e.g. when emergency cooling water is taken from a liquid reservoir, like the condensation chamber. Presence of gas in pumps may lead to abrasion at impeller blades, strong vibrations with damaging of bearings and loss of cooling for shaft and bearings and early fatigue as a consequence. At least it will lead to decreasing pump performance even to the point of abrupt collapse of flow rate. The presented work contributes quantitative measurements, visualizations and analyses of gas-liquid phase distributions to the fundamental understanding of the effects of air entrainment in centrifugal pumps. Advanced tomographic measuring methods with high spatial resolution were applied to investigate the two-phase distribution in the impeller region of an industrial centrifugal pump.