NUMERICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF A SMALL-SCALE SLIDING VANE PUMP

Automotive pumps have two forms either hydraulic or centrifugal one. Hydraulic pumps areusually positive displacement pumps. In the automotive industry, vane pumps have wide rangeof applications including fuel pumping, power steering system and automatic transmissionsystem. Fluid behavior costs a lot to be seen inside the pump during operation experimentallyhowever, predictive tools based on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), has become a validalternative approach to pump design and optimization. In this paper, CFD analysis for oil vanepump 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 wasvalidated by comparing the obtained numerical results with the experimental data of (fourvanes) pump. The model gave a good agreement with the experiment results, with maximumdeviation mm gave the largest flow-rate and best performance as well.