Another magazine dropped on my doormat, albeit a digital edition of ‘Damen Nieuws’1. The internal magazine for Damen colleagues. It featured an article with Suman Sapkota and me. Suman is our pump design specialist2 and at a Damen wide R&D convention he presented a poster on his pump design workflow within Damen Dredging Equipment. This caught the attention of the editorial board and we were interviewed on what we actually do for a living. Although we can’t share the exact details of the article or the poster, it is still an interesting message that we can highlight here.
The design of a dredge pump is based on the required specifications(1). The most important properties of the pump are: efficiency, NPSH, wear and ball passage. The first important property we try to fix is the ball passage3. We do use our own geometry generator(2) that assist us in creating a pump with a big ball passage. Unlike normal pumps, dredge pumps have to cope with debris and boulders that have to pass the impeller. The bigger chunks that can pass, the more uptime the dredge will have. Once we are satisfied with the geometry, we feed this through a file format converter(3). The resulting 3D file can be used on several platforms. This will enable us to create the digital solid for the engineering4, but it also gives us the negative volume, also known as fluid. Then to do mathematical operations on the digital fluid, we have to divide the volume into tiny cells. This process is called meshing.(4) When the mesh is available, the fluid flow through the mesh can be simulated with computational fluid dynamics.(5) All the fluid properties of every cell are calculated and the results are shared with the adjoining cells. This can be repeated until all properties of the cells don’t change very much anymore, a stable solution. Integrating all the properties of the cells give the resulting performance of the pump.
The estimated performance can be evaluated against the four properties.(6) The head times the capacity divided by the power required will give the efficiency. That is one of the items we wanted to know, as it relates to how much fuel will be consumed. The other parameter obtained from the CFD is the NPSH, or roughly: the suction performance. Wear cannot be estimated yet, but we are working on that2. Although the calculated turbulence might give a clue what wear to expect. If the properties are not satisfying our requirements we make an iteration in the geometry for improving the performance. However, changing the geometry will usually result in a smaller ball passage. If the parameters are OK to our requirements we have a pump design.(7) Manufacturing it is a completely different game.5
The design process of the dredge pump takes quite some effort and we are continually looking to improve the workflow6. Eventually we would like to be able to cater for all special requirements each individual customer might have.
Working for a dredge manufacturer, I am happy we design and produce our own pumps. It gives us the confidence, that when we supply dredges, they are as we like them to be. Another benefit is in discussions with the customer. It is easier when we can sit at the table as experts on their equipment assit them in finding a solution for their dredge.
References
- Damen Nieuws, Juni 2020, Damen
- Graduation Suman Sapkota: Where wear parts were worn down, Discover Dredging
- On The Relation Of Maximum Ball Passage And Recirculation Losses In Dredge Pumps, WODA
- Graduation Of Carsten Markus: Designing And Casting Of Impellers
- Don’t Play Games With Your Wear Part Planning
- Innovation, Damen