**Abstract**

The growing energy demand is expected to be met with increased oil and gas production. Hence, there is a need to design high-performance industrial centrifugal pumps. Recent improvements in CFD are considered as a valuable research tool to investigate the flow inside the pump and its influence on the performance of the centrifugal pump. The scope of the chapter is to emphasize the use of CFD and theoretical analysis for design and to show the prospect of improving the efficiency of a centrifugal pump. The chapter discusses the computational approaches to the CAD modeling and CFD simulation of the industrial centrifugal pumps, and the strategies and methodologies adopted. The chapter would be relevant and useful to both the pump designers, manufacturers, and industrial users.

**Keywords:** centrifugal pump, CFD, geometric modeling, computational modeling, NPSH, cavitation

### **1. Introduction**

Centrifugal pump has wide application areas as it is being used in the sectors like agriculture, oil and natural gas, public water supply, sanitation, domestic, household utilities, petroleum refining, petrochemicals, mining, etc. That is why the centrifugal pump has a significant effect on the nation's economy. The present chapter describes the steps in detail that include the design of industrial centrifugal pumps, construction of geometrical models of various components of centrifugal pumps, grid generation, governing equations, boundary conditions, discretization, CFD solver settings, and the importance of CFD in improving pump design and performance.

Despite wide applications, the design of the pump and its performance prediction using a conventional approach involves trial and error which is a timeconsuming task. CFD is a robust tool for prediction of performance of the centrifugal pumps that can be used to analyze and design the pump for performance and cavitation prediction [1], and condition monitoring [2] with a better understanding of flow physics. CFD analysis of any problem of engineering interest consists of three major steps, namely, pre-processing, simulation, and post-processing.
