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Andrea González (at the center of the image) and other finalists in the 2nd Engineering Internship Excellence Contest in Madrid.
Cerdanyola del Vallès, 3th December, 2021 Andrea González, a student from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), won the first prize in the 2nd Engineering Internship Excellence Contest with her work entitled "CFD predictions of water flow through impellers of the ALBA centrifugal pumps and their aspiration zone. An investigation of fluid dynamics effects on cavitation problems". The awards ceremony was held in Madrid last 29th November 2021. The internship work was supervised by Marcos Quispe, engineer from Transversal section (Engineering division) of ALBA.
Andrea's study addresses the ALBA refrigeration system pumps that present cavitation (formation of vapor or gas-filled cavities within a moving liquid) when operating at their normal regime. To alleviate this phenomenon temporarily until a definitive solution was found, the water flow was reduced to 67% of its nominal value. This resulted in a reduction of the accelerator cooling capacity. However, even at such low flow conditions, the flow has an anomalous oscillatory behavior in the distributor of the aspiration zone.
The paper presents an analysis of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applied to the aspiration zones of the pumps, to investigate the effects of fluid dynamics on cavitation problems and understand what may be happening in the system. The need for such research arises from the urge to recover the accelerator cooling capacity and the constant pursuit for the improvement of the system.
With the collaboration of Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología. The ALBA Synchrotron is part of the of the Unidades de Cultura Científica y de la Innovación (UCC+i) of the FECYT and has received support through the FCT-20-15798 project.
