Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “centrifugal pump”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 145 records · Page 8

A Comparison of Filter-based Approaches for Model-based Prognostics

Model-based prognostics approaches use domain knowledge about a system and its failure modes through the use of physics-based models. Model-based prognosis is generally divided into two sequential problems: a joint state-parameter estimation problem, in which, using the model, the health of a system or component is determined based on the observations; and a prediction problem, in which, using the model, the stateparameter distribution is simulated forward in time to compute end of life and remaining useful life. The first problem is typically solved through the use of a state observer, or filter. The choice of filter depends on the assumptions that may be made about the system, and on the desired algorithm performance. In this paper, we review three separate filters for the solution to the first problem: the Daum filter, an exact nonlinear filter; the unscented Kalman filter, which approximates nonlinearities through the use of a deterministic sampling method known as the unscented transform; and the particle filter, which approximates the state distribution using a finite set of discrete, weighted samples, called particles. Using a centrifugal pump as a case study, we conduct a number of simulation-based experiments investigating the performance of the different algorithms as applied to prognostics.

prognostics↗

Design of a Bearingless Blood Pump

In the field of open heart surgery, centrifugal blood pumps have major advantages over roller pumps. The main drawbacks to centrifugal pumps are however problems with the bearings and with the sealing of the rotor shaft. In this paper we present a concept for a simple, compact and cost effective solution for a blood pump with a totally magnetically suspended impeller. It is based on the new technology of the 'Bearingless Motor' and is therefore called the 'Bearingless Blood Pump.' A single bearingless slice motor is at the same time a motor and a bearing system and is able to stabilize the six degrees of freedom of the pump impeller in a very simple way. Three degrees of freedom are stabilized actively (the rotation and the radial displacement of the motor slice). The axial and the angular displacement are stabilized passively. The pump itself (without the motor-stator and the control electronics) is built very simply. It consists of two parts only: the impeller with the integrated machine rotor and the housing. So the part which gets in contact with blood and has therefore to be disposable, is cheap. Fabricated in quantities, it will cost less than $10 and will therefore be affordable for the use in a heart-lung-machine.

Barletta, Natale↗

Pump Propels Liquid And Gas Separately

Design for pump that handles mixtures of liquid and gas efficiently. Containing only one rotor, pump is combination of centrifuge, pitot pump, and blower. Applications include turbomachinery in powerplants and superchargers in automobile engines. Efficiencies lower than those achieved in separate components. Nevertheless, design is practical and results in low consumption of power.

Harvey, Andrew↗

Engineering Aspects in Blood Pump Development

NASA turbomachinery computer codes assisted in the design of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation's centrifugal bladed blood pump. The codes were originally developed for the aerospace industry, but are applicable to the blood pump because of a high degree of synergy with this application. Traditional turbomachinery design criteria were used in the design of the blood pump centrifugal impeller and volute casing. The fluid dynamic performance of the blood pump is meeting the engineering design goals of flow rate and pressure rise.

Golding, Leonard↗

Rotating and positive-displacement pumps for low-thrust rocket engines. Volume 1: Pump Evaluation and design

Rotating and positive displacement pumps of various types were studied for pumping liquid fluorine for low-thrust, high-performance rocket engines. Included in the analysis were: centrifugal, pitot, Barske, Tesla, drag, gear, vane, axial piston, radial piston, diaphragm, and helirotor pump concepts. The centrifugal pump and the gear pump were selected and these were carried through detailed design and fabrication. Mechanical difficulties were encountered with the gear pump during the preliminary tests in Freon-12. Further testing and development was therefore limited to the centrifugal pump. Tests on the centrifugal pump were conducted in Freon-12 to determine the hydrodynamic performance and in liquid fluorine to demonstrate chemical compatibility.

Macgregor, C.↗

Rocketdyne's advanced coal slurry pumping program

The Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell International Corporation is conducting a program for the engineering, fabrication, and testing of an experimental/prototype high-capacity, high-pressure centrifugal slurry feed pump for coal liquefaction purposes. The abrasion problems in a centrifugal slurry pump are primarily due to the manner in which the hard, solid particles contained in the slurry are transported through the hydraulic flow passages within the pump. The abrasive particles can create scraping, grinding, cutting, and sandblasting effects on the various exposed parts of the pump. These critical areas involving abrasion and impact erosion wear problems in a centrifugal pump are being addressed by Rocketdyne. The mechanisms of abrasion and erosion are being studied through hydrodynamic analysis, materials evaluation, and advanced design concepts.

Davis, D. E.↗

Temperature Rises In Pumps For Superfluid Helium

Report discusses increases in temperature of superfluid helium in centrifugal and fountain-effect pumps. Intended for use in transfers of superfluid helium in outer space. Increases in temperature significantly affect losses during transfers and are important in selection of temperatures of supply tanks. Purpose of study, increase in temperature in fountain-effect pump calculated on basis of thermodynamic considerations, starting from assumption of ideal pump. Results of recent tests of ceramic material intended for use in such pumps support this assumption. Overall, centrifugal pumps more effective because it produces smaller rise in temperature.

Kittel, Peter↗

Rotary Speed Sensor for Antilocking Brakes

Sensor based on fluidic principles produces negative pressure approximately proportional to rotational speed. Sensor developed as part of antilocking brake system for motorcycles. Uses inlet pressure rather than outlet pressure as braking-control signal, eliminating pressure pulsations caused by pump vanes and ensuring low-noise signal. Sensor is centrifugal air pump turned by one of motorcycle wheels. Air enters pump through orifice plates, and suction taken off through port in pump inlet plenum.

Berdahl, C. M.↗

Heart Pump Design for Cleveland Clinic Foundation

Through a Lewis CommTech Program project with the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, the NASA Lewis Research Center is playing a key role in the design and development of a permanently implantable, artificial heart pump assist device. Known as the Innovative Ventricular Assist System (IVAS), this device will take on the pumping role of the damaged left ventricle of the heart. The key part of the IVAS is a nonpulsatile (continuous flow) artificial heart pump with centrifugal impeller blades, driven by an electric motor. Lewis is part of an industry and academia team, led by the Ohio Aerospace Institute (OAI), that is working with the Cleveland Clinic Foundation to make IVAS a reality. This device has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives each year, since 80 percent of heart attack victims suffer irreversible damage to the left ventricle, the part of the heart that does most of the pumping. Impeller blade design codes and flow-modeling analytical codes will be used in the project. These codes were developed at Lewis for the aerospace industry but will be applicable to the IVAS design project. The analytical codes, which currently simulate the flow through the compressor and pump systems, will be used to simulate the flow within the blood pump in the artificial heart assist device. The Interdisciplinary Technology Office heads up Lewis' efforts in the IVAS project. With the aid of numerical modeling, the blood pump will address many design issues, including some fluid-dynamic design considerations that are unique to the properties of blood. Some of the issues that will be addressed in the design process include hemolysis, deposition, recirculation, pump efficiency, rotor thrust balance, and bearing lubrication. Optimum pumping system performance will be achieved by modeling all the interactions between the pump components. The interactions can be multidisciplinary and, therefore, are influenced not only by the fluid dynamics of adjacent components but also by thermal and structural effects. Lewis-developed flow-modeling codes to be used in the pump simulations will include a one-dimensional code and an incompressible three-dimensional Navier-Stokes flow code. These codes will analyze the prototype pump designed by the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. With an improved understanding of the flow phenomena within the prototype pump, design changes to improve the performance of the pump system can be verified by computer prior to fabrication in order to reduce risks. The use of Lewis flow modeling codes during the design and development process will improve pump system performance and reduce the number of prototypes built in the development phase. The first phase of the IVAS project is to fully develop the prototype in a laboratory environment that uses a water/glycerin mixture as the surrogate fluid to simulate blood. A later phase of the project will include testing in animals for final validation. Lewis will be involved in the IVAS project for 3 to 5 years.

Source record↗

Use of Blade Lean in Turbomachinery Redesign

Blade lean is used to improve the uniformity of exit flow distributions from turbomachinery blading. In turbines, it has been used to control secondary flows by tailoring blade turning to reduce flow overturning and underturning and to create more uniform loss distributions from hub to shroud. In the present study, the Pump Consortium centrifugal impeller has been redesigned using blade lean. The flow at the exit of the baseline impeller had large blade-to-blade variations, creating a highly unsteady flow for the downstream diffuser. Blade lean is used to redesign the flow to move the high loss fluid from the suction side to the hub, significantly reducing blade-toblade variations at the exit.

Moore, John↗

Monitoring the Microgravity Environment Quality On-Board the International Space Station Using Soft Computing Techniques

This paper presents an artificial intelligence monitoring system developed by the NASA Glenn Principal Investigator Microgravity Services project to help the principal investigator teams identify the primary vibratory disturbance sources that are active, at any moment in time, on-board the International Space Station, which might impact the microgravity environment their experiments are exposed to. From the Principal Investigator Microgravity Services' web site, the principal investigator teams can monitor via a graphical display, in near real time, which event(s) is/are on, such as crew activities, pumps, fans, centrifuges, compressor, crew exercise, platform structural modes, etc., and decide whether or not to run their experiments based on the acceleration environment associated with a specific event. This monitoring system is focused primarily on detecting the vibratory disturbance sources, but could be used as well to detect some of the transient disturbance sources, depending on the events duration. The system has built-in capability to detect both known and unknown vibratory disturbance sources. Several soft computing techniques such as Kohonen's Self-Organizing Feature Map, Learning Vector Quantization, Back-Propagation Neural Networks, and Fuzzy Logic were used to design the system.

Jules, Kenol↗

Monitoring the Microgravity Environment Quality On-board the International Space Station Using Soft Computing Techniques: Preliminary System Performance Results - Part 2

This paper presents the preliminary performance results of the artificial intelligence monitoring system in full operational mode using near real time acceleration data downlinked from the International Space Station. Preliminary microgravity environment characterization analysis result for the International Space Station (Increment-2), using the monitoring system is presented. Also, comparison between the system predicted performance based on ground test data for the US laboratory "Destiny" module and actual on-orbit performance, using measured acceleration data from the U.S. laboratory module of the International Space Station is presented. Finally, preliminary on-orbit disturbance magnitude levels are presented for the Experiment of Physics of Colloids in Space, which are compared with on ground test data. The ground test data for the Experiment of Physics of Colloids in Space were acquired from the Microgravity Emission Laboratory, located at the NASA Glenn Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio. The artificial intelligence was developed by the NASA Glenn Principal Investigator Microgravity Services Project to help the principal investigator teams identify the primary vibratory disturbance sources that are active, at any moment of time, on-board the International Space Station, which might impact the microgravity environment their experiments are exposed to. From the Principal Investigator Microgravity Services' web site, the principal investigator teams can monitor via a dynamic graphical display, implemented in Java, in near real time, which event(s) is/are on, such as crew activities, pumps, fans, centrifuges, compressor, crew exercise, structural modes, etc., and decide whether or not to run their experiments, whenever that is an option, based on the acceleration magnitude and frequency sensitivity associated with that experiment. This monitoring system detects primarily the vibratory disturbance sources. The system has built-in capability to detect both known and unknown vibratory disturbance sources. Several soft computing techniques such as Kohonen's Self-Organizing Feature Map, Learning Vector Quantization, Back-Propagation Neural Networks, and Fuzzy Logic were used to design the system.

Jules, Kenol↗

The monitoring system for vibratory disturbance detection in microgravity environment aboard the international space station

Scientists in the Office of Life and Microgravity Sciences and Applications within the Microgravity Research Division oversee studies in important physical, chemical, and biological processes in microgravity environment. Research is conducted in microgravity environment because of the beneficial results that come about for experiments. When research is done in normal gravity, scientists are limited to results that are affected by the gravity of Earth. Microgravity provides an environment where solid, liquid, and gas can be observed in a natural state of free fall and where many different variables are eliminated. One challenge that NASA faces is that space flight opportunities need to be used effectively and efficiently in order to ensure that some of the most scientifically promising research is conducted. Different vibratory sources are continually active aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Some of the vibratory sources include crew exercise, experiment setup, machinery startup (life support fans, pumps, freezer/compressor, centrifuge), thruster firings, and some unknown events. The Space Acceleration Measurement System (SAMs), which acts as the hardware and carefully positioned aboard the ISS, along with the Microgravity Environment Monitoring System MEMS), which acts as the software and is located here at NASA Glenn, are used to detect these vibratory sources aboard the ISS and recognize them as disturbances. The various vibratory disturbances can sometimes be harmful to the scientists different research projects. Some vibratory disturbances are recognized by the MEMS's database and some are not. Mainly, the unknown events that occur aboard the International Space Station are the ones of major concern. To better aid in the research experiments, the unknown events are identified and verified as unknown events. Features, such as frequency, acceleration level, time and date of recognition of the new patterns are stored in an Excel database. My task is to carefully synthesize frequency and acceleration patterns of unknown events within the Excel database into a new file to determine whether or not certain information that is received i s considered a real vibratory source. Once considered as a vibratory source, further analysis is carried out. The resulting information is used to retrain the MEMS to recognize them as known patterns. These different vibratory disturbances are being constantly monitored to observe if, in any way, the disturbances have an effect on the microgravity environment that research experiments are exposed to. If the disturbance has little or no effect on the experiments, then research is continued. However, if the disturbance is harmful to the experiment, scientists act accordingly by either minimizing the source or terminating the research and neither NASA's time nor money is wasted.

Laster, Rachel M.↗

Application of a neural network as a potential aid in predicting NTF pump failure

The National Transonic Facility has three centrifugal multi-stage pumps to supply liquid nitrogen to the wind tunnel. Pump reliability is critical to facility operation and test capability. A highly desirable goal is to be able to detect a pump rotating component problem as early as possible during normal operation and avoid serious damage to other pump components. If a problem is detected before serious damage occurs, the repair cost and downtime could be reduced significantly. A neural network-based tool was developed for monitoring pump performance and aiding in predicting pump failure. Once trained, neural networks can rapidly process many combinations of input values other than those used for training to approximate previously unknown output values. This neural network was applied to establish relationships among the critical frequencies and aid in predicting failures. Training pairs were developed from frequency scans from typical tunnel operations. After training, various combinations of critical pump frequencies were propagated through the neural network. The approximated output was used to create a contour plot depicting the relationships of the input frequencies to the output pump frequency.

Rogers, James L.↗

Rotating and positive-displacement pumps for low-thrust rocket engines. Volume 2: Fabrication and testing

Rotating and positive displacement pumps of various types were studied for pumping liquid fluorine for low thrust high performance rocket engines. Included in the analysis were: centrifugal, pitot, Barske, Tesla, drag, gear, vane, axial piston, radial piston, diaphragm and helirotor pump concepts. The centrifugal and gear pumps were carried through detail design and fabrication. After preliminary testing in Freon 12, the centrifugal pump was selected for further testing and development. It was tested in Freon 12 to obtain the hydrodynamic performance. Tests were also conducted in liquid fluorine to demonstrate chemical compatibility.

Csomor, A.↗