Floating ring seals offer an opportunity to reduce leakage flows significantly in rotating machinery. Accordingly, they have been applied successfully to rotating machinery within the last several decades. For rocket turbopump applications, fundamental behavior and design philosophy have been revealed. However, further work is needed to explore the rotordynamic characteristics associated with rotor vibrations. In this study, rotordynamic forces for floating ring seals under rotor's whirling motions are calculated to elucidate rotordynamic characteristics. Comparisons between numerical simulation results and experiments demonstrated in our previous report are carried out. The three-dimensional Reynolds equation is solved by the finite-difference method to calculate hydrodynamic pressure distributions and the leakage flow rate. The entrance loss at the upstream inlet of the seal ring is calculated to estimate the Lomakin effect. The friction force at the secondary seal surface is also considered. Numerical simulation results showed that the rotordynamic forces of this type of floating ring seal are determined mainly by the friction force at the secondary seal surface. The seal ring is positioned almost concentrically relative to the rotor by the Lomakin effect. Numerical simulations agree quite well with the experimental results.

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The performance of a prototype pump converted from that of its model pump shows an increase in efficiency brought about by a decrease in friction loss. As the friction force working on impeller blades causes partial peripheral motion on the outlet flow from the impeller, the increase in the prototype's efficiency causes also a decrease in its input power. This paper discusses results of analyses on the behavior of the theoretical head or input power of a prototype pump. The equation of friction-drag coefficient for a flat plate was applied for the analysis of hydraulic loss in impeller blade passages. It was revealed that the friction-drag of a flat plate could be, to a certain degree, substituted for the friction drag of impeller blades, i.e. as a means for analyzing the relationship between a prototype pump's efficiency increase and input power decrease.

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Due to the nature of cavitation numerical analyses, computational optimization of a pump with respect to the cavitation properties is extremely demanding. In this paper it is shown how a combination of Transient Blade Row (TBR) method and some simplifications can be used for making the optimization process more efficient and thus possible on current generation of hardware. The aim of the paper is not the theory of hydraulic design. Instead, the practical aspects of numerical optimization are shown. This is done on an example of a radial pump and a combination of ANSYS CFX, ANSYS software tools and custom scripts is used. First, a comparison of TBR and fully-transient simulation is made. Based on the results, the TBR method is chosen and a parametric model assembled. Design of Experiment (DOE) table is computed and the results are used for sensitivity analysis. As the last step, the final design is created and computed as fully-transient. In conclusion, the results are discussed.

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Almost 70% of the earth is covered by the ocean. Extracting the power available in the ocean using a wave energy converter has been seen to be eco-friendly and renewable. This study focuses on developing a method for analyzing a wave energy device that uses a cross-flow turbine. The motion of the ocean wave causes an internal bi-directional flow of water and the cross-flow turbine is able to rotate in one direction. This device is considered of double-hull structure, and because of this structure, sea water does not come into contact with theturbine. Due to this, the problem of befouling on the turbine is avoided. This study shows specific relationship for wave length and several motions.

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Exergetic analysis was introduced in optimization of a rotating equilateral triangular internal cooling channel with staggered square ribs to maximize the net exergy gain. The objective function was defined as the net exergy gain considering the exergy gain by heat transfer and exergy losses by friction and heat transfer process. The flow field and heat transfer in the channel were analysed using three-dimensional Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations under the uniform temperature condition. Shear stress transport turbulence model has been selected as a turbulence closure through the turbulence model test. Computational results for the area-averaged Nusselt number were validated compared to the experimental data. Three design variables, i.e., the angle of rib, the rib pitch-to-hydraulic diameter ratio and the rib width-to-hydraulic diameter ratio, were selected for the optimization. The optimization was performed at Reynolds number, 20,000. Twenty-two design points were selected by Latin hypercube sampling, and the values of the objective function were evaluated by the RANS analysis at these points. Through optimization, the objective function value was improved by 22.6% compared to that of the reference geometry. Effects of the Reynolds number, rotation number, and buoyancy parameter on the heat transfer performance of the optimum design were also discussed.

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An unsteady three-dimensional simulation based on Reynolds time-averaged governing equation and RNG k-ε turbulence model, was presented for pump-as-turbine, the pressure fluctuation characteristic of hydraulic turbine with guide vane was obtained. The results show that the time domains of pressure fluctuation in volute change periodically and have identical cycles. In volute tongue and inlet pressure fluctuations are light, while in dynamic and static coupling interface pressure fluctuations are serious; In impeller blade region the pressure fluctuation of pressure surface are lighter than that of suction surface. The dominant frequencies of pressure fluctuation concentrate in low frequency region, and concentrate within 2 times of the blade passing frequency.

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The alternating flow hydraulics (AFH) had demonstrated the unique features in the past. One of the most well-known inventions was the hydraulic machine-gun synchronizer, which had become the standard equipment of airplane during World War I. The studies on the AFH between 1960 and 1980 had trigged many researchers' interests and reached the summit. The disadvantages of the AFH like low efficiency and cooling difficulty had prevented the further development. Few people are engaged in studying the AFH at present. However, the unique characteristics of the AFH inspire the researchers to continuously explore the new special suitable applications. The overviews of the AFH and the new potential application in the geotechnical testing field have been discussed in this paper. First, the research results of the AFH in the past have been summarized. Then, the classifications of the AFH have been introduced in detail according to the working principle, the number of hydraulic transmission pipelines and the mode of input energy. The advantages and the disadvantages of the AFH have been discussed. A novel potential suitable application in the soil test field has been presented at last. The detailed designing ideas of a new dynamic trixial instrument have been given, which will be a more innovational and energy-saving plan according to the current studies. A series of simulation experiments have been done. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme for the new dynamic trixial instrument is feasible. The paper work will also give some inspirations in the reciprocating motion control system.

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To meet the demand of higher handling capacity, a mixed-flow submersible deep well pump was designed and tested. The main hydraulic components are made of plastics, which is free of erosion, light-weight, and environment-friendly. To simplify plastic molding process, and to improve productivity, an axial-radial guide vane was proposed. To clarify its effect on the performance, a radial guide vane and a space guide vane are developed as well. By comparison, the efficiency of the pump equipped with the axial-radial guide vane is higher than the radial guide vane and is lower than the space guide vane, and its high efficiency range is wide. The static pressure recovery of the axial guide vane is a bit lower than the space guide vane, but it is much larger than the radial guide vane. Taking the cost and molding complexity into consideration, the axial-radial guide vane is much economic, promoting its popularity for the moderate and high specific speed submersible deep well pumps.

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Energy systems working coherently in different conditions may not have a specific design which can provide optimal performance. A system working for a longer period at lower efficiency implies higher energy consumption. In this effort, a methodology demonstrated by a jet pump design and optimization via numerical modeling for fluid dynamics and implementation of an evolutionary algorithm for the optimization shows a reduction in computational costs. The jet pump inherently has a low efficiency because of improper mixing of primary and secondary fluids, and multiple momentum and energy transfer phenomena associated with it. The high fidelity solutions were obtained through a validated numerical model to construct an approximate function through surrogate analysis. Pareto-optimal solutions for two objective functions, i.e., secondary fluid pressure head and primary fluid pressure-drop, were generated through a multi-objective genetic algorithm. For the jet pump geometry, a design space of several design variables was discretized using the Latin hypercube sampling method for the optimization. The performance analysis of the surrogate models shows that the combined surrogates perform better than a single surrogate and the optimized jet pump shows a higher performance. The approach can be implemented in other energy systems to find a better design.

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The development of heavy-duty process pumps, usually based on various design criteria, depends on the pump's application. The most important criteria are Q-H, efficiency and NPSH characteristics. Cavitation due to inlet recirculation is not often one of the design criteria, although many problems in pump operation appear because of inlet recirculation, when the operation range is from 0.5-0.8 Qopt.
The present paper shows that steady state CFD analysis of inlet recirculation can give quite good results for the design of new hydraulic shapes, which have been developed to expand operating range and to minimize the harmful influence of recirculation at part load. In this paper, the structures of inlet recirculation are presented, as well as detailed shapes of vortices between the blades for various operating regimes, axial velocity distribution at the impeller inlet, the experimental results of NPSH and efficiency characteristics of an existing and newly designed pump.

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