Experimental Investigation of the Effect of Suction Valve Opening on the Performance and Detection of Cavitation in the Centrifugal Pump Based on Acoustic Analysis Technique

The pump performance and occurrence of cavitation directly depends on different operating conditions. To cover a wide range of operation conditions for detecting cavitation in this work, investigations on the effect of various suction valve openings on cavitation in the pump were carried out. In order to analyse various levels of cavitation in different operation conditions, the effect of the decrease in the inlet suction pressure of the centrifugal pump by controlling the inlet suction valve opening was investigated using this experimental setup. Hence, the acoustic and pressure signals under different inlet valve openings and different flow rates, namely, 103, 200, 302 l/min were collected for this purpose. A detailed analysis of the results obtained from the acoustic signal was carried out to predict cavitation in the pump under different operating conditions. Also, the acoustic signal was investigated in time domain through the use of the same statistical features. The FFT technique was used to analyse the acoustic signal in the frequency domain. In addition, in this work an attempt was made to find a relationship between the cavitation and noise characteristics using the acoustic technique for identifying cavitation within a pump.