Enhancing Pump as Turbine (PAT) performances: A numerical investigation into the impact of impeller leading edge rounding

Pump As Turbine (PAT) utility represents a major advance in the field of hydraulic engineering. This work aims to improve the PAT performance characteristics. The sharp impeller leading edge (original impeller) was revealed by flow analysis as exhibiting negative effects on the PAT performances due to flow separation and flow misalignment. The performances of rounded and original impeller leading edge were studied by Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) method carried out on ANSYS CFX. Although impeller leading edge rounding has notably improved the performances in off design conditions, the difference of efficiency between the both impeller types was decreasing when increasing the discharge. The hydraulic head generated by the rounded impeller leading edge was also slightly higher at part load conditions, but when increasing the discharge, the difference between the both heads became negligible. It appeared from numerical simulations that the impeller leading edge rounding allows to decrease the hydraulic losses of the individual sub-domains except the outlet pipe. For the seek of a comprehensive analysis, the significant losses were computed for the two impeller geometries. It was observed that the shock losses and swirling losses of the rounded impeller leading edge were lower at part load conditions, but when increasing the discharge, the both losses were lower for the original impeller geometry. The rounded impeller leading edge exhibited as well lower wall frictional losses for the entire operating range of discharge.