Acceleration Head for Centrifugal Pumps

Written by Terry Henshaw, P.E.

If a centrifugal pump is started with the discharge valve open too far and with a low discharge pressure, the liquid in the suction line may accelerate at a rate that causes the suction pressure to drop below vapor pressure. In other words, you can cause cavitation by allowing the pumpage to accelerate too rapidly in the suction line. If the pump's capacity is controlled by a quick opening valve on the discharge side (such as seen in steel mill descaling systems), the pump may be provided with insufficient NPSH when the pumpage is accelerating to the rated capacity. The equation for calculating the head drop due to the acceleration (assuming uniform acceleration) may be reduced to the following:

Where: ha = Head required to accelerate the liquid in the suction line, feet or meters L = Total length of the suction line, feet or meters V2 = The final velocity of pumpage, feet/sec or meters/sec V1 = The initial velocity of pumpage, feet/sec or meters/sec g = Acceleration of gravity (32.2 ft/s2 or 9.8 m/s2) t = Time increment that pumpage accelerates from V1 to V2, seconds

Acceleration Head for Reciprocating Pumps Pulsing Flow Requires More NPSH
The flow in the suction and discharge piping of a reciprocating pump is not constant. The pumpage must accelerate and decelerate a number of times for each revolution of the crankshaft. Because the liquid has mass, and therefore inertia, energy is required to produce the acceleration. This energy is returned to the system upon deceleration, so there is no loss. However, sufficient NPSH must be provided on the suction side of the pump to accelerate the liquid to prevent cavitation in the suction pipe and/or pumping chambers. Figure 1 plots the ideal relative fluid velocity in the suction pipe for a typical triplex power pump as a function of the rotative angle of the crankshaft. (To achieve this ideal velocity profile, the pumpage must be incompressible, and the pump valves must open and close at the beginning and end of the plunger stroke, which is often not the case.) Acceleration may be more clearly visualized if we change the scales on this curve. If we change the abscissa from degrees of rotation to time (which is done by dividing by 360 and revolutions per second), and change the ordinate to pipe velocity rather than relative velocity (by multiplying by average pipe velocity), we have a plot of velocity versus time in the suction pipe.