Abo Bibliothek: Guest

ISSN Online: 2377-424X

ISBN Print: 978-1-56700-474-8

ISBN Online: 978-1-56700-473-1

International Heat Transfer Conference 16
August, 10-15, 2018, Beijing, China

THREE-DIMENSIONAL NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS OF HELICOIDAL MHD PUMPS

Get access (open in a dialog) DOI: 10.1615/IHTC16.mmp.022737
pages 5669-5676

Abstrakt

In this work, the performance of a helical-type MHD device was evaluated for pumping applications. The goal of this study was to assess its technical viability for electrically conducting fluids, in order to suggest alternative designs that would require lower maintenance costs compared with commonly used centrifugal pumps, due to the absence of moving parts. The pump design consists of a circular pipe combined with an electrically insulated helix. Different helix climb angles were considered during this investigation, in order to evaluate the opposing effects of viscous and Lorentz forces. The electrodes were located on the inner pipe wall and on a rod positioned along the pipe centerline. The magnetic field generated by an exterior solenoid coil, that would produce a uniform and unidirectional magnetic field, was considered. Seawater was considered as the flowing fluid. The flow was considered incompressible, turbulent and three-dimensional. Furthermore, as a first approximation, the thermal effects were neglected, and isothermal flow conditions were assumed. Both the hydrodynamic and electromagnetic fields were obtained using specific commercial computational packages and the numerical simulations were carried out on a high performance computer. The results indicate that the helical pump design yields services with higher heads and lower volumetric flows than other typical geometries used for MHD pump simulations.