A Study on a Twin-Screw Pump for Thermal Management Systems by means of CFD using SimericsMP+®: experimental validation and focus on Pressure Pulsation

This research is about an innovative methodology for simulating spindle pumps using a full 3D-CFD transient approach by means of Simerics MP+®. Spindle pumps are known from the literature to be very reliable, efficient, and low-noise emission machines. Latest EU Regulations have been ambitious by pushing the transportation sector increasingly towards the reduction of primary harmful pollutants and CO2 emissions. In this context, the thermal management of BEVs (Battery Electric Vehicle) is gaining a new technological interest. In this scenario, improvements on pump efficiency are needed to determinately reduce the absorbed energy during real on-the-road operation. Commonly, centrifugal pumps are used for this kind of application, but their efficiency is highly vulnerable to rotational speed, wasting energy in real exercise, even if they are designed to have a very high efficiency at the design point. Thus, adopting an accurately designed spindle pump for thermal management systems could fit the new needs coming, in particular, from the automotive industry. Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) allows the real-time monitoring of pressure distribution, velocity field, mass flow rate, rotor torque, and other performance indicators resulting in a very powerful tool to lead design and optimization phases of such kind of machines. In this paper, a new Simerics MP+® template which allows for the simulation of spindle pumps, never presented in literature, has been adopted and validated by comparing the model results with tests coming from an experimental campaign. In the last section, data on pressure-pulsation of a spindle-pump using CFD are shown for the first time: considerations are carried out both in time-domain and frequency-domain