THE IMPACT OF SELECTED PARAMETERS ON PRESSURE DISTRIBUTION IN THE FACE THROTTLE OF A CENTRIFUGAL PUMP AUTOMATIC BALANCING DEVICE

Face throttles are a necessary functional element of non-contact face seals and automatic balancing devices of centrifugal pumps of different constructions. To calculate the hydrodynamic forces and moments acting on the rotor and fluid flow through the automatic balancing device, it is necessary to know the pressure distribution in the cylindrical and face throttle when considering all important factors which predetermine fluid flow. The face throttle surfaces are moving, which leads to unsteady fluid flow. The movement of the walls of the face throttle causes an additional circumferential and radial flow, which subsequently leads to the additional hydrodynamic pressure components. The paper analyses viscous incompressible fluid flow in the face throttle of an automatic balancing device taking into account the axial and angular displacements of throttle’s surfaces and the inertia component of the fluid. The effect of local hydraulic losses as well as random changes in the coefficients of local hydraulic resistance at the inlet and outlet of the throttle is analysed.

Pre-Sinkhole Seismicity at the Napoleonville Salt Dome: Implications for Local Seismic Monitoring of Underground Caverns

The formation of a sinkhole at the Napoleonville salt dome located near Bayou Corne in Assumption Parish, Louisiana, was preceded by an increase in seismicity, as observed 10 km away by a continuously recording broadband seismic sensor. The seismicity rate in the days prior to the sinkhole formation contained hundreds of long-period events, some of which could be detected using a power detector (short-term to long-term energy ratio) tuned to the duration and frequency content of the seismicity. A characteristic of some of these events is a resonance near 0.4 Hz, which could be due to either an acoustic resonance within the brine-filled cavity or possibly due to unsteady fluid flow through a crack. A more exhaustive catalog was obtained using some of the events detected by the power detector as templates in a correlation detector. The full pre-sinkhole sequence of detections could offer lessons in remote monitoring of underground caverns.

OSCILLATION DAMPER CALCULATION BASED ON THE ELECTRO HYDRAULIC ANALOGY

The method of the synthesis and the pressure fluctuations damping calculation based on the electro-hydraulic analogy is proposed. The mathematical model describing the processes of unsteady fluid flow through the device is developed. Using the composed transfer function and its approximation, the oscillation damper parameters identification to reduce the outlet pressure pulsations in the triplex plunger pump is carried out.

Analysis of Unsteady Behaviour of Natural Circulation Helium Loop

This paper deals with the one-dimensional unsteady fluid flow model of the natural circulation loop. The presented model represents the experimental facility Helium Loop STU which is the physical model of an emergency coolant system of a nuclear reactor. The governing equations are solved according both Euler and Lagrange approaches on two parallel computational grids. Linearization of equations and semi-implicit discretization scheme are used to enhance the algorithm effectiveness. The simulation results were compared to experimental data. The model can be considered as high-accurate in comparison with experimental data (relative error 1.14÷1.15 % at specified time interval).