Analysis of unsteady wake flow in centrifugal pump volute by using mode decomposition method

To analyze the coherent structure of wake flow in volute and its corresponding frequency information, dynamic modal decomposition (DMD), classic and spectral proper orthogonal decomposition (SPOD), were employed to decompose the transient flow field of the centrifugal pump volute. The snapshot set was constructed by means of the velocity field data at different moments in volute based on the large eddy simulation (LES) approach. The basic principles of the DMD, POD, and SPOD methods were compared in detail, and the decomposition results of the three methods on the wake flow structure in volute were compared and analyzed. The analysis results show that DMD can decompose the wake flow into coherent structures with different frequencies, including the basic steady-state structure, the dynamic modal flow field structure characterizing rotor–stator interaction (the first three modes with frequencies of 145.81, 291.61, and 437.43 Hz, respectively), and dissipative modal flow field structure characterizing fragmentized vortex (the fourth mode with a frequency of 486.03 Hz) in the volute. The POD can decompose the wake flow into flow structures with different energy levels. The first four modal energies account for more than 66% of total energy, which represents the large-scale structure with higher energy, and its dominant frequencies correspond to the blade passing frequency (145 Hz) and its frequency multiplication (290 Hz). The SPOD can not only decompose the complex wake flow into structural features of different energy levels but also has single-frequency characteristics of its modal structures. Compared with DMD and POD methods, the SPOD has the advantages of both, and can reflect the evolution characteristics of the wake flow in the volute.