On the balance of capacities and methods for conducting energy tests of low-consumption centrifugal pumps

The article discusses the structural features of low-consumption pump units of rocket and space modules: correction and detonation braking engines of spacecraft; pumps of auxiliary energy systems (supercharging, gas generation, systems for providing thermal regimes of aircraft, etc.).
The main features of such pumps are low working rates (V/ω < 5 ∙ 10^-7 м³); small dimensions of the flow path (< 0.1 m); low power (< 1 kW); high speed (up to 100 000 rpm). Open impellers are widely used in the design of impellers, which has determined significant difficulties in balancing power losses, considering the fact that the hydraulic and mechanical losses of the wheel do not have physical boundaries separating the relative movement in the flowing part of the impeller and the circumferential power losses in portable motion relative to the stationary wall of the pump housing. The traditional method of balance testing for closed wheels involves replacing the impeller with a “false” wheel with an identical boundary contour of cylindrical surfaces. In the case of open wheels, the authors propose a methodological technique for measuring the torque element by element on a fixed pump housing.
The constructive implementation of a special meter in a balancing suspension required significant costs in the development of methodological and computational support for testing. These modifications resulted in changes to the relations in the mathematical power balance model, as well as the calculation and simulation algorithms for the low-flow centrifugal pump.
As a result of testing, the resulting coefficient value for open-type impellers of the low-flow pump lies in the range of 0.8 to 0.9, which is slightly higher than the values for closed-type impellers.

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