Numerical and Experimental Study of a Small-Scale Sliding Vane Pump

Abstract

Automotive pumps have two forms either hydraulic or centrifugal one. Hydraulic pumps are usually positive displacement pumps. In the automotive industry, vane pumps have wide range of applications including fuel pumping, power steering system and automatic transmission system. Fluid behavior costs a lot to be seen inside the pump during operation experimentally however, predictive tools based on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), has become a valid alternative approach to pump design and optimization. In this paper, CFD analysis for oil vane pump will be shown including different (number of vanes) models and different gap heights. The numerical model was built up with ANSYS (Fluent) using dynamic mesh code and it was validated by comparing the obtained numerical results with the experimental data of (four vanes) pump. The model gave a good agreement with the experiment results, with maximum deviation <6 % in the flow rate. The eight vanes pump model and the gap with a height of 0.1 mm gave the largest flow-rate and best performance as well.