Check It Out: CFdesign for Optimizing Pump Designs, 2 in a Series

By DE Editors

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

Those of you of a certain age possessing a deep sophistication of high culture likely remember Hans and Franz, Saturday Night Live's goofball body builders and owners of a gym in New Jersey. Said to be Arnold Schwarzenegger's cousins from Austria, their signature line was that they were going to “pump you up.” Faced with ballooning energy costs and pressured to produce more efficient equipment to meet green energy initiatives, pump industry designers could use all the help pumping up that they can get to reach their full potential. CFdesign is one way you can get you there.

CFdesign provides a comprehensive solution that can simulate an entire range of industrial pump and pump-specific speeds. You can optimize the flow performance of all types of pump characteristics like single- or double-suction, multi-stage, axial and radial, and positive displacement pumps such as sliding vane and gear pumps. You can obtain pressure gradients throughout a pump, and you can determine optimal blade profiles. You can even develop flow capacity and efficiency curves or see where cavitation will happen.

And seeing is probably the best part of the deal when you use CFdesign. You can see what is going on inside your pump and determine what is getting in the way of the performance you want. That's something you just can't do with pricey physical testing. Since you can use CFdesign from the earliest stages of your design project, you also eliminate all sorts of problems way before physical testing. That not only shortens your design-to-market cycle, it helps you make a more robust product and lowers your costs.

In 3:30 minutes, today's Check It Out video, “Methods for Solving Pump Design Challenges,” will give you a taste of how CFdesign can be a game changer for industrial pump designers. You'll also find below the video links to a couple of short case studies. The first is about how a manufacturer of centrifugal pumps used CFdesign to generate a complete pump performance curve in just 2 hours. The second you'll probably want to send to your money watchdog after reading it because it's about how one manufacturer used CFdesign and reduced product development time by more than 30 percent.

So, there you have it. A new way to design industrial pumps. As Hans and Franz might say, today's Check It Out will show you how CFdesign can help you reach your full “pumptential.”

Thanks, Pal — Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering Magazine