Application of the Modified Inverse Design Method in the Optimization of the Runner Blade of a Mixed-Flow Pump

Abstract To improve the design speed and reduce the design cost for the previous blade design method, a modified inverse design method is presented. In the new method, after a series of physical and mathematical simplifications, a sail-like constrained area is proposed, which can be used to configure different runner blade shapes. Then, the new method is applied to redesign and optimize the runner blade of the scale core component of the 1400-MW canned nuclear coolant pump in an established multi-optimization system compromising the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis, the Response Surface Methodology (RSM) and the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGA-II). After the execution of the optimization procedure, three optimal samples were ultimately obtained. Then, through comparative analysis using the target runner blade, it was found that the maximum efficiency improvement reached 1.6%, while the head improvement was about 10%. Overall, a promising runner blade inverse design method which will benefit the hydraulic design of the mixed-flow pump has been proposed.