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IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science OPEN ACCESS A CFD model for orbital gerotor motor To cite this article: H Ding et al 2012 IOP Conf. Ser.: Earth Environ. Sci. 15 062006 View the article online for updates and enhancements. You may also like A systematic methodology for energy modeling improvement of cross-ventilated buildings in dense urban areas Mohammadreza Shirzadi, Parham A. Mirzaei and Mohammad Naghashzadegan - Synchrotron speckle-based x-ray phase- contrast imaging for mapping intra- aneurysmal blood flow without contrast agent Mohammad Izadifar, Michael E Kelly and Lissa Peeling - Accuracy quantification of a CFD model in complex site by cross-checking wind measurements G Crasto, L Terzi and A Lombardi - This content was downloaded from IP address 211.203.138.196 on 25/02/2022 at 18:45
Transcript
Page 1: A CFD model for orbital gerotor motor - IOPscience

IOP Conference Series Earth and Environmental Science

OPEN ACCESS

A CFD model for orbital gerotor motorTo cite this article H Ding et al 2012 IOP Conf Ser Earth Environ Sci 15 062006

View the article online for updates and enhancements

You may also likeA systematic methodology for energymodeling improvement of cross-ventilatedbuildings in dense urban areasMohammadreza Shirzadi Parham AMirzaei and Mohammad Naghashzadegan

-

Synchrotron speckle-based x-ray phase-contrast imaging for mapping intra-aneurysmal blood flow without contrastagentMohammad Izadifar Michael E Kelly andLissa Peeling

-

Accuracy quantification of a CFD model incomplex site by cross-checking windmeasurementsG Crasto L Terzi and A Lombardi

-

This content was downloaded from IP address 211203138196 on 25022022 at 1845

A CFD model for orbital gerotor motor

H Ding1 X J Lu

2 and B Jiang

3

1Simerics Incorporated

1750 112th Ave NE Ste A203 Bellevue 98004 USA 2Ningbo Zhongyi Hydraulic Motor Co Ltd

88 Zhongyi Road Zhenhai Economic Development Zone Ningbo China 3College of Mechanical Engineering University of Shanghai for Science and

Technology 516 Jun Gong Road Shanghai 200093 China

hdsimericscom

Abstract In this paper a full 3D transient CFD model for orbital gerotor motor is described in

detail One of the key technologies to model such a fluid machine is the mesh treatment for the

dynamically changing rotor fluid volume Based on the geometry and the working mechanism

of the orbital gerotor a movingdeforming mesh algorithm was introduced and implemented in

a CFD software package The test simulations show that the proposed algorithm is accurate

robust and efficient when applied to industrial orbital gerotor motor designs Simulation

results are presented in the paper and compared with experiment test data

1 Introduction

A gerotor is a positive displacement machine which has an inner gear and an outer gear For a normal

gerotor machine the inner gear which is the drive gear and the driven outer gear rotate around their

own fixed centers during operation Due to their compact design low cost and robustness normal

gerotor pumps are widely used in many industrial applications There is an alternative design the

orbital gerotor in which the outer gear is stationary while the inner gear rotates around an orbiting

center [1] The orbital gerotor can be used as a motor to obtain high torque output at low rotation

speed with small dimension In this design typically a rotating flow distributor is used to maintain

proper timing connecting the inlet and the outlet ports to the rotor

CFD models of normal gerotor pumps have been used to improve gerotor designs in many

engineering applications for the last decades In 1997 Jiang and Perng [2] created the first full 3D

transient CFD model for a gerotor pump and included a cavitation model Their model successfully

predicted gerotor pump volumetric efficiency loses due to cavitation Kini et al [3] coupled CFD

simulation with a structural solver to determine deflection of the cover plate in the pump assembly due

to variation in internal pressure profiles during operation Zhang et al [4] studied the effects of the

inlet pressure tip clearance porting and the metering groove geometry on pump flow performances

and pressure ripples using CFD model Natchimuthu et al [5] Ruvalcaba et al [6] also used CFD to

analyze gerotor oil pump flow patterns Jiang et al [7] created a 3D CFD model for crescent pumps a

variation of gerotor pumps with a crescent shaped island between the inner and outer gears

In comparison CFD studies of orbital type of gerotor are rare Authors of this paper have not found

any full 3D CFD model for this type of gerotor in the literature Because of the difference in motion

mechanism traditional gerotor model cannot be applied directly to orbital gerotor Modifications in

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd 1

movingdeforming mesh algorithm as well as modifications in surface velocity assignment torque and

power calculations are necessary Orbital gerotors are commonly used as motors which have much

higher pressure differences and even smaller fluid gaps as compared with normal gerotor pumps

Those two conditions impose big challenges for the flow solver That could be one of the main reasons

why CFD analysis for orbital gerotors is not very popular

2 Orbital Gerotor Motor Configuration and Simulation Strategy

21 Working Principle of an Orbital Gerotor Motor

As shown in Figure 1 an orbital gerotor motor has a stationary outer gear and a rotating inner gear

Inner gear has 1 less tooth than the outer gear During operation the inner gear rotates and rolls over

the outer gear teeth During the movement the inner gear center also rotates around the outer gear

center in the opposite direction Each time when the inner gear advances one tooth the inner gear

center already rotates a complete revolution Therefore the rotation speed of the center is NTin times

that of the inner gear rotation speed where NTin is the number of inner gear teeth Figure 11 to Figure

110 show the sequence of gear motion for one complete revolution of the inner gear center

6

7

8

9

10

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

2

Figure 1 Orbital gerotor motor

Each cavity between neighboring outer gear teeth bounded by the inner gear surface forms a fluid

ldquopocketrdquo During the operation those fluid pockets change shape and volume When the volume

increases it will draw in fluid When the volume decreases it will drive the fluid out Combined with

proper connections with the inlet and the outlet ports those dynamically changing pockets will move

the fluid from the inlet to the outlet while at the same time outputting torque and power to the shaft

Figure 2 shows the complete shape change sequences of one of the pockets when the inner gear

advances one tooth over the outer gear The plots 21 to 25 show the sequences of the expansion half

cycle and 26 to 210 show the compression half cycle

Unlike a normal gerotor where the fluid ldquopocketsrdquo are rotating and the inlet and outlet ports are

stationary for orbiting gerotor those fluid ldquopocketsrdquo stay in the same location during the operation In

order to provide proper timing for the connections with the inlet and the outlet typically there is a

rotating distributor to create dynamic bridges between the ports and the rotor The purpose of the

distributor is to connect each pocket to the high pressure inlet during its expansion half cycle and to

the low pressure outlet during its compression half cycle Typically the flow distributor rotates at the

same speed as the inner gear Extra caution needs to be taken when creating fluid volumes for the flow

distributor and the rotor It is important to make sure that the initial relative position between the inner

gear and the distributor is accurate otherwise the motor system may not work as expected

Figure 2 Shape and volume change sequence of one fluid pocket

22 Instant Center of Rotation

Since the inner gear of an orbiting gerotor does not have a fixed rotation axis calculating the hydraulic

torque applied to the inner gear becomes an issue One way to resolve this issue is to find the

instantaneous center of rotation of the inner gear For a body undergoing planar movement the

instantaneous center of rotation (ICOR) is the point where the velocity is zero at a particular instance

of time At that instance the body is doing a pure rotation around the ICOR If the ICOR is known the

hydraulic torque can be calculated as the torque against the ICOR at that moment

1

2 3 4 5

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

3

Figure 3 Instant center of rotation

ICOR of an orbital gerotor inner gear can be found by checking the velocity distribution on the

inner rotor As shown in Figure 4 all the points on the inner gear undergo a composite motion a)

translation with the motion of the gear center and b) rotation around the gear center with speed in

The inner gear center itself rotates around the outer gear center with the speed of c As mentioned

previously the relationship between the two rotation speeds is

(1)

As shown in figure 4 we can always draw a line (line of symmetry) connecting the inner gear

center and the outer gear center at any moment of time Defining a right-hand coordinate system with

the origin at the inner gear center the y axis along the symmetry line and the x axis in a direction

perpendicular to the y axis enables the velocity of the inner gear center in x and y directions to be

defined as

(2)

(3)

where Ec is the eccentricity of the inner gear or the distance between the inner gear center and the

outer gear center For any point on inner gear with coordinates (x y) the velocity components for

rotation around the inner gear center are

(4)

(5)

and the combined velocities are

(6)

(7)

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

4

From equation (6) and (7) it is clear that at the point (0 ) both velocity components equal

zero Therefore that point corresponds to the coordinates of the instant center of rotation Since the

line of symmetry rotates around the outer gear center at the speed of c it is very straight forward to

calculate ICOR during the simulation

23 Mesh Solution

Similarly the motion of the inner gear boundary can be determined through the composite motion of

the rotation around the inner gear center plus the translation of the inner gear center The shape of the

fluid volume for the rotor is then properly defined

Meshing of movingdeforming fluid domains in a positive displacement (PD) fluid machine is

always very challenging As a typical PD machine gerotor motor has many dynamic fluid gaps with

very small clearances down to several microns Those gaps have a strong influence on machinersquos

performance including flow leakage and volumetric efficiency flow and pressure ripple pressure lock

cavitation and erosion and torque and power Therefore they have to be modeled accurately Many

generic moving mesh solutions for example the immersed boundary method have difficulties in

modeling such dynamic gaps So far the most successful solution for creating a gerotor rotor mesh is

the structured movingsliding mesh approach commonly used in normal gerotor pump simulations

(Jiang and Perng [2]) This approach is also adapted in this study

In the structured movingsliding mesh approach the fluid volume of the rotor chamber is separated

from the other parts of the fluid domain Topologically the rotor volume is similar to a ring and an

initial structured mesh can be easily created for that kind of shape The rotor mesh will be connected

to other fluid volumes through sliding interfaces When the inner gear surface moves to a new position

the mesh on the surface of the inner gear does not simply move with the inner gear surface Instead

the mesh ldquoslidesrdquo on the inner gear surface while make the necessary adjustments to conform to the

new clearance between the inner gear surface and the outer gear surface Simultaneously the interface

connections between the rotor volume and other fluid volumes are updated Figure 3 shows a typical

structured mesh for a gerotor rotor volume

Figure 4 Gerotor rotor structured mesh

24 Implementation

The proposed orbital gerotor model was implemented in the commercial CFD package PumpLinxreg

as

a new template A template in PumpLinx provides two main functionalities 1) It creates the initial

rotor mesh and controls mesh moving deformation of the rotor and other dynamic fluid volumes

during the simulation and 2) It provides special setup and post processing options for that specific

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

5

fluid machine With the help of the template user can setup a complete orbital gerotor motor in less

than 30 minutes starting from proper CAD geometry output One can refer to Ding et al [8] for a more

detailed description of the software

3 CFD Solver and Governing Equations

The CFD package used in this study solves conservation equations of mass and momentum using a

finite volume approach Those conservation laws can be written in integral representation as

(8)

(9)

The standard k two-equation model (Launder amp Spalding [9]) is used to account for turbulence

(10)

(11)

The cavitation model included in the software describes the cavitation vapor distribution using the

following formulation (Singhal et al [10])

(12)

where is the diffusivity of the vapor mass fraction and f is the turbulent Schmidt number The effects

of liquid vapor non-condensable gas (typically air) and liquid compressibility are all accounted for in

the model The final density calculation for the mixture is done by

(13)

This software package has been successfully used in CFD simulations for many different types of

positive displacement machines including swash plate piston pump [11] gerotor pump [8] external

gear pump [12] crescent pump [7] and variable displacement vane pump [13]

4 Gerotor Motor Test Case

An industrial orbital gerotor motor was used to demonstrate the proposed CFD model Figure 5 is the

solid model of the motor This motor has two ports port A and port B The inner gear and flow

distributor can also rotate in both directions without mechanical adjustment The flow and rotation

directions are determined by which port is connected to the high pressure fluid and which port is

connected to the low pressure fluid The one connected to the high pressure fluid becomes the inlet

and the rotation direction will also change accordingly

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

6

Figure 5 Solid model of an orbital gerotor motor

The fluid domain was subtracted from CAD geometry and divided into several volumes and

meshed separately (Figure 6) Except for the rotor part which was created with structured mesh all

other fluid volumes were meshed with unstructured binary tree mesh The special movingsliding

mesh of rotor volume and the rotation of flow distributor volume were automatically processed by the

template and the rest of the fluid volumes stayed stationary during the simulation Those independent

volumes were connected through sliding interfaces during simulation A total of 360000 cells was

used in this model

Figure 6 Fluid volumes with mesh

The working fluid used in the model is the high performance anti-wear hydraulic fluid HM46 The

properties of HM46 are listed in Table 1 Determined based on the information provided by motor

manufacturer operating conditions used in simulation are also listed in table 1

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

7

Table 1 Fluid properties and operating conditions

Density (kgm3) 879

Viscosity (PaS) 004

Rotation speed (RPM) 100

Inlet pressure (MPa) 1

Outlet pressure (MPa) 16

5 Simulation Results and Discussion

Figure 7 shows the pressure distribution of high pressure inlet low pressure outlet and the flow

distributor The magenta color indicates high pressure and the blue color indicates low pressure with

an overall pressure range from 0 to 18 MPa

Figure 7 Pressure distribution on inletoutlet ports and flow distributor

The flow distributor for this motor has a total of 16 shoe shaped connectors to be connected to the

rotor fluid pockets Eight of the connectors connect to the low pressure outlet and the other eight

connect to the high pressure inlet The connectors are arranged alternately and rotate at the same speed

as the inner gear to create the proper timing of the connections

Figure 8 shows the simulation results at 4 different moments In the picture surfaces are colored by

pressure with red representing high pressure and blue representing low pressure with an overall range

from 0 to 20 MPa Small spheres in those pictures are massless particles used to visualize the flow

field The white lines extruding from the particles show the direction and magnitude of the velocity of

each particle One can see that the red particles coming from the high pressure inlet are drawn into

the rotor And the blue particles after the pockets connect to the low pressure port are driven away

from the rotor towards the outlet

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

8

Figure 8 Pressure distribution and particle tracing

Figures 9 to 12 plot the time history of the pressure in one of the fluid pocket the mass flow rate

the power applied to the inner gear and the torque applied to the inner gear These curves correspond

to a 100 RPM rotation speed for one complete revolution of the inner gear The horizontal axis for

these plots is the rotation angle of the inner gear

Figure 9 Pressure in a fluid pocket

Figure 10 Mass flow rate

The plots show that the solution has a clear periodical pattern except in the first couple of time

steps The pattern repeats itself every time the inner gear advances one tooth This means that under

the current simulation conditions one only needs to solve 2 to 3 inner gear teeth rotation or 90 to 135

degree of the inner gear rotation to have a complete set of flow characteristics of the motor The

transient simulation time to model one gear tooth rotation for these simulation conditions is about 35

minutes on a quad-core single CPU 22GHZ I7 2720QM Laptop Computer

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

9

Figure 11 Hydraulic power

Figure 12 Torque

Experimental test samples provided by the manufacturer have rotational speeds ranging from 103

to 117RPM and pressure differences ranging from 15 to 17 MPa For this type of motor the flow rate

is a linear function of the rotation speed and the torque is a linear function of the pressure difference

In order to have a fair comparison the test flow rates are linearly converted to 100 RPM and the test

torques are linearly converted to15 MPa pressure difference The converted volume flow rate and

output torque of 41 test samples are plotted in figure 13 and 14 against the CFD simulation results

The horizontal axis of the two plots is test sample number The plots show that the CFD flow rate

prediction matches very well with the test data The predicted torque is about 12 higher than the test

results Since torque measured in the experiment is the final output torque from the motor it has

mechanical and friction loses that are not accounted for in CFD results This could be the main reason

for the discrepancy in CFD torque prediction

Figure 13 Comparison of predicted and test flow

rate

Figure 14 Comparison of predicted and test

torque

Figures 15 and 16 plot the flow rate and power vs rotation speed respectively As expected both

the flow rate and the power are linearly increasing with the rotation speed

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

10

Figure 15 Flow rate vs rotation speed Figure 16 Power vs rotation speed

Figure 17 plots the torque vs the rotational speed From this plot one can see that the torque of

orbital gerotor motor is not a strong function of rotational speed However the torque does decrease

slightly when the rotational speed increases

Figure 17 Torque vs rotation speed

6 Conclusions

By analyzing the working mechanism of orbital gerotor motors a CFD model for such fluid machine

was developed and implemented as a new template in the CFD software PumpLinx Simulation for a

production motor shows that the present computational model is accurate and efficient Itrsquos also found

that the flow solver used in the current study is very robust in handling very high mesh aspect ratios

and very small dynamic leakage gaps With the demonstrated speed robustness and accuracy this

model can be used as a high fidelity design tool in the design process or as a diagnosis tool for orbital

gerotor motors

Nomenclature

c

C1

C2

Cc

Ce

C

Df

Ec

f

fv

Inner gear center

Turbulence model constant

Turbulence model constant

Cavitation model constant

Cavitation model constant

Turbulence model constant

Diffusivity of vapor mass fraction

Inner gear eccentricity

Body force (N)

Vapor mass fraction

t

Sij

U

u

u

v

v vx vy x y

Time

Strain tensor

Initial velocity

Velocity component (ms)

Component of v

Velocity vector

Turbulent fluctuation velocity

Velocity in x y direction

Coordinates

Turbulence dissipation

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

11

fg

Gt

ICOR

in

k

L

M

NT

n p

Q

Rc

Re

RPM

Non-condensable gas mass fraction

Turbulent generation term

Instant center of rotation

Inner gear

Turbulence kinetic energy

Length

Mass flow rate (Kgs)

Number of gear teeth

Surface normal

Pressure (Pa)

Flow rate (m3h)

Vapor condensation rate

Vapor generation rate

Revolution per minute

t g l v k l f

Fluid viscosity (Pa-s)

Turbulent viscosity (Pa-s)

Fluid density (kgm3)

Gas density (kgm3)

Liquid density (kgm3)

Vapor density (kgm3)

Surface of control volume

Turbulence model constant

Surface tension

Turbulence model constant

Turbulent Schmidt numberStress tensor

Control volume

Rotation speed

References

[1] Ivantysyn J and Ivantysnova M 2003 Hydrostatic Pumps and Motors (New Delhi

Tech Books International)

[2] Jiang Y and Perng C 1997 An Efficient 3D Transient Computational Model for Vane Oil Pump

and Gerotor Oil Pump Simulations SAE Technical Paper 970841

[3] Kini S Mapara N Thoms R and Chang P 2005 Numerical Simulation of Cover Plate Deflection

in the Gerotor Pump SAE Technical Paper 2005-01-1917

[4] Zhang D Perng C and Laverty M 2006 Gerotor Oil Pump Performance and FlowPressure

Ripple Study SAE Technical Paper 2006-01-0359

[5] Natchimuthu K Sureshkumar J and Ganesan V 2010 CFD Analysis of Flow through a Gerotor

Oil Pump SAE Technical Paper 2010-01-1111

[6] Ruvalcaba M A and Hu X Gerotor Fuel Pump Performance and Leakage Study ASME 2011 Int

Mechanical Engineering Congress amp Exposition (Denver Colorado USA 2011)

[7] Jiang Y Furmanczyk M Lowry S and Zhang D et al 2008 A Three-Dimensional Design Tool

for Crescent Oil Pumps SAE Technical Paper 2008-01-0003

[8] Ding H Visser F C Jiang Y and Furmanczyk M 2011 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 133(1)

011101

[9] Launder B E and Spalding D B 1974 Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 3 269-289

[10] Singhal A K Athavale M M Li H Y and Jiang Y 2002 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 124(3)

617-624

[11] Meincke O and Rahmfeld R 2008 6th Int Fluid Power Conf (Dresden 1-2 April 2008) 485-99

[12] Heisler A Moskwa J and Fronczak F 2009 The Design of Low-Inertia High-Speed External

Gear PumpMotors for Hydrostatic Dynamometer Systems SAE Technical Paper 2009-01-

1117

[13] Wang D Ding H Jiang Y and Xiang X 2012 Numerical Modeling of Vane Oil Pump with

Variable Displacement SAE Technical Paper 2012-01-0637

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

12

Page 2: A CFD model for orbital gerotor motor - IOPscience

A CFD model for orbital gerotor motor

H Ding1 X J Lu

2 and B Jiang

3

1Simerics Incorporated

1750 112th Ave NE Ste A203 Bellevue 98004 USA 2Ningbo Zhongyi Hydraulic Motor Co Ltd

88 Zhongyi Road Zhenhai Economic Development Zone Ningbo China 3College of Mechanical Engineering University of Shanghai for Science and

Technology 516 Jun Gong Road Shanghai 200093 China

hdsimericscom

Abstract In this paper a full 3D transient CFD model for orbital gerotor motor is described in

detail One of the key technologies to model such a fluid machine is the mesh treatment for the

dynamically changing rotor fluid volume Based on the geometry and the working mechanism

of the orbital gerotor a movingdeforming mesh algorithm was introduced and implemented in

a CFD software package The test simulations show that the proposed algorithm is accurate

robust and efficient when applied to industrial orbital gerotor motor designs Simulation

results are presented in the paper and compared with experiment test data

1 Introduction

A gerotor is a positive displacement machine which has an inner gear and an outer gear For a normal

gerotor machine the inner gear which is the drive gear and the driven outer gear rotate around their

own fixed centers during operation Due to their compact design low cost and robustness normal

gerotor pumps are widely used in many industrial applications There is an alternative design the

orbital gerotor in which the outer gear is stationary while the inner gear rotates around an orbiting

center [1] The orbital gerotor can be used as a motor to obtain high torque output at low rotation

speed with small dimension In this design typically a rotating flow distributor is used to maintain

proper timing connecting the inlet and the outlet ports to the rotor

CFD models of normal gerotor pumps have been used to improve gerotor designs in many

engineering applications for the last decades In 1997 Jiang and Perng [2] created the first full 3D

transient CFD model for a gerotor pump and included a cavitation model Their model successfully

predicted gerotor pump volumetric efficiency loses due to cavitation Kini et al [3] coupled CFD

simulation with a structural solver to determine deflection of the cover plate in the pump assembly due

to variation in internal pressure profiles during operation Zhang et al [4] studied the effects of the

inlet pressure tip clearance porting and the metering groove geometry on pump flow performances

and pressure ripples using CFD model Natchimuthu et al [5] Ruvalcaba et al [6] also used CFD to

analyze gerotor oil pump flow patterns Jiang et al [7] created a 3D CFD model for crescent pumps a

variation of gerotor pumps with a crescent shaped island between the inner and outer gears

In comparison CFD studies of orbital type of gerotor are rare Authors of this paper have not found

any full 3D CFD model for this type of gerotor in the literature Because of the difference in motion

mechanism traditional gerotor model cannot be applied directly to orbital gerotor Modifications in

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd 1

movingdeforming mesh algorithm as well as modifications in surface velocity assignment torque and

power calculations are necessary Orbital gerotors are commonly used as motors which have much

higher pressure differences and even smaller fluid gaps as compared with normal gerotor pumps

Those two conditions impose big challenges for the flow solver That could be one of the main reasons

why CFD analysis for orbital gerotors is not very popular

2 Orbital Gerotor Motor Configuration and Simulation Strategy

21 Working Principle of an Orbital Gerotor Motor

As shown in Figure 1 an orbital gerotor motor has a stationary outer gear and a rotating inner gear

Inner gear has 1 less tooth than the outer gear During operation the inner gear rotates and rolls over

the outer gear teeth During the movement the inner gear center also rotates around the outer gear

center in the opposite direction Each time when the inner gear advances one tooth the inner gear

center already rotates a complete revolution Therefore the rotation speed of the center is NTin times

that of the inner gear rotation speed where NTin is the number of inner gear teeth Figure 11 to Figure

110 show the sequence of gear motion for one complete revolution of the inner gear center

6

7

8

9

10

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

2

Figure 1 Orbital gerotor motor

Each cavity between neighboring outer gear teeth bounded by the inner gear surface forms a fluid

ldquopocketrdquo During the operation those fluid pockets change shape and volume When the volume

increases it will draw in fluid When the volume decreases it will drive the fluid out Combined with

proper connections with the inlet and the outlet ports those dynamically changing pockets will move

the fluid from the inlet to the outlet while at the same time outputting torque and power to the shaft

Figure 2 shows the complete shape change sequences of one of the pockets when the inner gear

advances one tooth over the outer gear The plots 21 to 25 show the sequences of the expansion half

cycle and 26 to 210 show the compression half cycle

Unlike a normal gerotor where the fluid ldquopocketsrdquo are rotating and the inlet and outlet ports are

stationary for orbiting gerotor those fluid ldquopocketsrdquo stay in the same location during the operation In

order to provide proper timing for the connections with the inlet and the outlet typically there is a

rotating distributor to create dynamic bridges between the ports and the rotor The purpose of the

distributor is to connect each pocket to the high pressure inlet during its expansion half cycle and to

the low pressure outlet during its compression half cycle Typically the flow distributor rotates at the

same speed as the inner gear Extra caution needs to be taken when creating fluid volumes for the flow

distributor and the rotor It is important to make sure that the initial relative position between the inner

gear and the distributor is accurate otherwise the motor system may not work as expected

Figure 2 Shape and volume change sequence of one fluid pocket

22 Instant Center of Rotation

Since the inner gear of an orbiting gerotor does not have a fixed rotation axis calculating the hydraulic

torque applied to the inner gear becomes an issue One way to resolve this issue is to find the

instantaneous center of rotation of the inner gear For a body undergoing planar movement the

instantaneous center of rotation (ICOR) is the point where the velocity is zero at a particular instance

of time At that instance the body is doing a pure rotation around the ICOR If the ICOR is known the

hydraulic torque can be calculated as the torque against the ICOR at that moment

1

2 3 4 5

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

3

Figure 3 Instant center of rotation

ICOR of an orbital gerotor inner gear can be found by checking the velocity distribution on the

inner rotor As shown in Figure 4 all the points on the inner gear undergo a composite motion a)

translation with the motion of the gear center and b) rotation around the gear center with speed in

The inner gear center itself rotates around the outer gear center with the speed of c As mentioned

previously the relationship between the two rotation speeds is

(1)

As shown in figure 4 we can always draw a line (line of symmetry) connecting the inner gear

center and the outer gear center at any moment of time Defining a right-hand coordinate system with

the origin at the inner gear center the y axis along the symmetry line and the x axis in a direction

perpendicular to the y axis enables the velocity of the inner gear center in x and y directions to be

defined as

(2)

(3)

where Ec is the eccentricity of the inner gear or the distance between the inner gear center and the

outer gear center For any point on inner gear with coordinates (x y) the velocity components for

rotation around the inner gear center are

(4)

(5)

and the combined velocities are

(6)

(7)

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

4

From equation (6) and (7) it is clear that at the point (0 ) both velocity components equal

zero Therefore that point corresponds to the coordinates of the instant center of rotation Since the

line of symmetry rotates around the outer gear center at the speed of c it is very straight forward to

calculate ICOR during the simulation

23 Mesh Solution

Similarly the motion of the inner gear boundary can be determined through the composite motion of

the rotation around the inner gear center plus the translation of the inner gear center The shape of the

fluid volume for the rotor is then properly defined

Meshing of movingdeforming fluid domains in a positive displacement (PD) fluid machine is

always very challenging As a typical PD machine gerotor motor has many dynamic fluid gaps with

very small clearances down to several microns Those gaps have a strong influence on machinersquos

performance including flow leakage and volumetric efficiency flow and pressure ripple pressure lock

cavitation and erosion and torque and power Therefore they have to be modeled accurately Many

generic moving mesh solutions for example the immersed boundary method have difficulties in

modeling such dynamic gaps So far the most successful solution for creating a gerotor rotor mesh is

the structured movingsliding mesh approach commonly used in normal gerotor pump simulations

(Jiang and Perng [2]) This approach is also adapted in this study

In the structured movingsliding mesh approach the fluid volume of the rotor chamber is separated

from the other parts of the fluid domain Topologically the rotor volume is similar to a ring and an

initial structured mesh can be easily created for that kind of shape The rotor mesh will be connected

to other fluid volumes through sliding interfaces When the inner gear surface moves to a new position

the mesh on the surface of the inner gear does not simply move with the inner gear surface Instead

the mesh ldquoslidesrdquo on the inner gear surface while make the necessary adjustments to conform to the

new clearance between the inner gear surface and the outer gear surface Simultaneously the interface

connections between the rotor volume and other fluid volumes are updated Figure 3 shows a typical

structured mesh for a gerotor rotor volume

Figure 4 Gerotor rotor structured mesh

24 Implementation

The proposed orbital gerotor model was implemented in the commercial CFD package PumpLinxreg

as

a new template A template in PumpLinx provides two main functionalities 1) It creates the initial

rotor mesh and controls mesh moving deformation of the rotor and other dynamic fluid volumes

during the simulation and 2) It provides special setup and post processing options for that specific

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

5

fluid machine With the help of the template user can setup a complete orbital gerotor motor in less

than 30 minutes starting from proper CAD geometry output One can refer to Ding et al [8] for a more

detailed description of the software

3 CFD Solver and Governing Equations

The CFD package used in this study solves conservation equations of mass and momentum using a

finite volume approach Those conservation laws can be written in integral representation as

(8)

(9)

The standard k two-equation model (Launder amp Spalding [9]) is used to account for turbulence

(10)

(11)

The cavitation model included in the software describes the cavitation vapor distribution using the

following formulation (Singhal et al [10])

(12)

where is the diffusivity of the vapor mass fraction and f is the turbulent Schmidt number The effects

of liquid vapor non-condensable gas (typically air) and liquid compressibility are all accounted for in

the model The final density calculation for the mixture is done by

(13)

This software package has been successfully used in CFD simulations for many different types of

positive displacement machines including swash plate piston pump [11] gerotor pump [8] external

gear pump [12] crescent pump [7] and variable displacement vane pump [13]

4 Gerotor Motor Test Case

An industrial orbital gerotor motor was used to demonstrate the proposed CFD model Figure 5 is the

solid model of the motor This motor has two ports port A and port B The inner gear and flow

distributor can also rotate in both directions without mechanical adjustment The flow and rotation

directions are determined by which port is connected to the high pressure fluid and which port is

connected to the low pressure fluid The one connected to the high pressure fluid becomes the inlet

and the rotation direction will also change accordingly

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

6

Figure 5 Solid model of an orbital gerotor motor

The fluid domain was subtracted from CAD geometry and divided into several volumes and

meshed separately (Figure 6) Except for the rotor part which was created with structured mesh all

other fluid volumes were meshed with unstructured binary tree mesh The special movingsliding

mesh of rotor volume and the rotation of flow distributor volume were automatically processed by the

template and the rest of the fluid volumes stayed stationary during the simulation Those independent

volumes were connected through sliding interfaces during simulation A total of 360000 cells was

used in this model

Figure 6 Fluid volumes with mesh

The working fluid used in the model is the high performance anti-wear hydraulic fluid HM46 The

properties of HM46 are listed in Table 1 Determined based on the information provided by motor

manufacturer operating conditions used in simulation are also listed in table 1

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

7

Table 1 Fluid properties and operating conditions

Density (kgm3) 879

Viscosity (PaS) 004

Rotation speed (RPM) 100

Inlet pressure (MPa) 1

Outlet pressure (MPa) 16

5 Simulation Results and Discussion

Figure 7 shows the pressure distribution of high pressure inlet low pressure outlet and the flow

distributor The magenta color indicates high pressure and the blue color indicates low pressure with

an overall pressure range from 0 to 18 MPa

Figure 7 Pressure distribution on inletoutlet ports and flow distributor

The flow distributor for this motor has a total of 16 shoe shaped connectors to be connected to the

rotor fluid pockets Eight of the connectors connect to the low pressure outlet and the other eight

connect to the high pressure inlet The connectors are arranged alternately and rotate at the same speed

as the inner gear to create the proper timing of the connections

Figure 8 shows the simulation results at 4 different moments In the picture surfaces are colored by

pressure with red representing high pressure and blue representing low pressure with an overall range

from 0 to 20 MPa Small spheres in those pictures are massless particles used to visualize the flow

field The white lines extruding from the particles show the direction and magnitude of the velocity of

each particle One can see that the red particles coming from the high pressure inlet are drawn into

the rotor And the blue particles after the pockets connect to the low pressure port are driven away

from the rotor towards the outlet

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

8

Figure 8 Pressure distribution and particle tracing

Figures 9 to 12 plot the time history of the pressure in one of the fluid pocket the mass flow rate

the power applied to the inner gear and the torque applied to the inner gear These curves correspond

to a 100 RPM rotation speed for one complete revolution of the inner gear The horizontal axis for

these plots is the rotation angle of the inner gear

Figure 9 Pressure in a fluid pocket

Figure 10 Mass flow rate

The plots show that the solution has a clear periodical pattern except in the first couple of time

steps The pattern repeats itself every time the inner gear advances one tooth This means that under

the current simulation conditions one only needs to solve 2 to 3 inner gear teeth rotation or 90 to 135

degree of the inner gear rotation to have a complete set of flow characteristics of the motor The

transient simulation time to model one gear tooth rotation for these simulation conditions is about 35

minutes on a quad-core single CPU 22GHZ I7 2720QM Laptop Computer

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

9

Figure 11 Hydraulic power

Figure 12 Torque

Experimental test samples provided by the manufacturer have rotational speeds ranging from 103

to 117RPM and pressure differences ranging from 15 to 17 MPa For this type of motor the flow rate

is a linear function of the rotation speed and the torque is a linear function of the pressure difference

In order to have a fair comparison the test flow rates are linearly converted to 100 RPM and the test

torques are linearly converted to15 MPa pressure difference The converted volume flow rate and

output torque of 41 test samples are plotted in figure 13 and 14 against the CFD simulation results

The horizontal axis of the two plots is test sample number The plots show that the CFD flow rate

prediction matches very well with the test data The predicted torque is about 12 higher than the test

results Since torque measured in the experiment is the final output torque from the motor it has

mechanical and friction loses that are not accounted for in CFD results This could be the main reason

for the discrepancy in CFD torque prediction

Figure 13 Comparison of predicted and test flow

rate

Figure 14 Comparison of predicted and test

torque

Figures 15 and 16 plot the flow rate and power vs rotation speed respectively As expected both

the flow rate and the power are linearly increasing with the rotation speed

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

10

Figure 15 Flow rate vs rotation speed Figure 16 Power vs rotation speed

Figure 17 plots the torque vs the rotational speed From this plot one can see that the torque of

orbital gerotor motor is not a strong function of rotational speed However the torque does decrease

slightly when the rotational speed increases

Figure 17 Torque vs rotation speed

6 Conclusions

By analyzing the working mechanism of orbital gerotor motors a CFD model for such fluid machine

was developed and implemented as a new template in the CFD software PumpLinx Simulation for a

production motor shows that the present computational model is accurate and efficient Itrsquos also found

that the flow solver used in the current study is very robust in handling very high mesh aspect ratios

and very small dynamic leakage gaps With the demonstrated speed robustness and accuracy this

model can be used as a high fidelity design tool in the design process or as a diagnosis tool for orbital

gerotor motors

Nomenclature

c

C1

C2

Cc

Ce

C

Df

Ec

f

fv

Inner gear center

Turbulence model constant

Turbulence model constant

Cavitation model constant

Cavitation model constant

Turbulence model constant

Diffusivity of vapor mass fraction

Inner gear eccentricity

Body force (N)

Vapor mass fraction

t

Sij

U

u

u

v

v vx vy x y

Time

Strain tensor

Initial velocity

Velocity component (ms)

Component of v

Velocity vector

Turbulent fluctuation velocity

Velocity in x y direction

Coordinates

Turbulence dissipation

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

11

fg

Gt

ICOR

in

k

L

M

NT

n p

Q

Rc

Re

RPM

Non-condensable gas mass fraction

Turbulent generation term

Instant center of rotation

Inner gear

Turbulence kinetic energy

Length

Mass flow rate (Kgs)

Number of gear teeth

Surface normal

Pressure (Pa)

Flow rate (m3h)

Vapor condensation rate

Vapor generation rate

Revolution per minute

t g l v k l f

Fluid viscosity (Pa-s)

Turbulent viscosity (Pa-s)

Fluid density (kgm3)

Gas density (kgm3)

Liquid density (kgm3)

Vapor density (kgm3)

Surface of control volume

Turbulence model constant

Surface tension

Turbulence model constant

Turbulent Schmidt numberStress tensor

Control volume

Rotation speed

References

[1] Ivantysyn J and Ivantysnova M 2003 Hydrostatic Pumps and Motors (New Delhi

Tech Books International)

[2] Jiang Y and Perng C 1997 An Efficient 3D Transient Computational Model for Vane Oil Pump

and Gerotor Oil Pump Simulations SAE Technical Paper 970841

[3] Kini S Mapara N Thoms R and Chang P 2005 Numerical Simulation of Cover Plate Deflection

in the Gerotor Pump SAE Technical Paper 2005-01-1917

[4] Zhang D Perng C and Laverty M 2006 Gerotor Oil Pump Performance and FlowPressure

Ripple Study SAE Technical Paper 2006-01-0359

[5] Natchimuthu K Sureshkumar J and Ganesan V 2010 CFD Analysis of Flow through a Gerotor

Oil Pump SAE Technical Paper 2010-01-1111

[6] Ruvalcaba M A and Hu X Gerotor Fuel Pump Performance and Leakage Study ASME 2011 Int

Mechanical Engineering Congress amp Exposition (Denver Colorado USA 2011)

[7] Jiang Y Furmanczyk M Lowry S and Zhang D et al 2008 A Three-Dimensional Design Tool

for Crescent Oil Pumps SAE Technical Paper 2008-01-0003

[8] Ding H Visser F C Jiang Y and Furmanczyk M 2011 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 133(1)

011101

[9] Launder B E and Spalding D B 1974 Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 3 269-289

[10] Singhal A K Athavale M M Li H Y and Jiang Y 2002 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 124(3)

617-624

[11] Meincke O and Rahmfeld R 2008 6th Int Fluid Power Conf (Dresden 1-2 April 2008) 485-99

[12] Heisler A Moskwa J and Fronczak F 2009 The Design of Low-Inertia High-Speed External

Gear PumpMotors for Hydrostatic Dynamometer Systems SAE Technical Paper 2009-01-

1117

[13] Wang D Ding H Jiang Y and Xiang X 2012 Numerical Modeling of Vane Oil Pump with

Variable Displacement SAE Technical Paper 2012-01-0637

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

12

Page 3: A CFD model for orbital gerotor motor - IOPscience

movingdeforming mesh algorithm as well as modifications in surface velocity assignment torque and

power calculations are necessary Orbital gerotors are commonly used as motors which have much

higher pressure differences and even smaller fluid gaps as compared with normal gerotor pumps

Those two conditions impose big challenges for the flow solver That could be one of the main reasons

why CFD analysis for orbital gerotors is not very popular

2 Orbital Gerotor Motor Configuration and Simulation Strategy

21 Working Principle of an Orbital Gerotor Motor

As shown in Figure 1 an orbital gerotor motor has a stationary outer gear and a rotating inner gear

Inner gear has 1 less tooth than the outer gear During operation the inner gear rotates and rolls over

the outer gear teeth During the movement the inner gear center also rotates around the outer gear

center in the opposite direction Each time when the inner gear advances one tooth the inner gear

center already rotates a complete revolution Therefore the rotation speed of the center is NTin times

that of the inner gear rotation speed where NTin is the number of inner gear teeth Figure 11 to Figure

110 show the sequence of gear motion for one complete revolution of the inner gear center

6

7

8

9

10

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

2

Figure 1 Orbital gerotor motor

Each cavity between neighboring outer gear teeth bounded by the inner gear surface forms a fluid

ldquopocketrdquo During the operation those fluid pockets change shape and volume When the volume

increases it will draw in fluid When the volume decreases it will drive the fluid out Combined with

proper connections with the inlet and the outlet ports those dynamically changing pockets will move

the fluid from the inlet to the outlet while at the same time outputting torque and power to the shaft

Figure 2 shows the complete shape change sequences of one of the pockets when the inner gear

advances one tooth over the outer gear The plots 21 to 25 show the sequences of the expansion half

cycle and 26 to 210 show the compression half cycle

Unlike a normal gerotor where the fluid ldquopocketsrdquo are rotating and the inlet and outlet ports are

stationary for orbiting gerotor those fluid ldquopocketsrdquo stay in the same location during the operation In

order to provide proper timing for the connections with the inlet and the outlet typically there is a

rotating distributor to create dynamic bridges between the ports and the rotor The purpose of the

distributor is to connect each pocket to the high pressure inlet during its expansion half cycle and to

the low pressure outlet during its compression half cycle Typically the flow distributor rotates at the

same speed as the inner gear Extra caution needs to be taken when creating fluid volumes for the flow

distributor and the rotor It is important to make sure that the initial relative position between the inner

gear and the distributor is accurate otherwise the motor system may not work as expected

Figure 2 Shape and volume change sequence of one fluid pocket

22 Instant Center of Rotation

Since the inner gear of an orbiting gerotor does not have a fixed rotation axis calculating the hydraulic

torque applied to the inner gear becomes an issue One way to resolve this issue is to find the

instantaneous center of rotation of the inner gear For a body undergoing planar movement the

instantaneous center of rotation (ICOR) is the point where the velocity is zero at a particular instance

of time At that instance the body is doing a pure rotation around the ICOR If the ICOR is known the

hydraulic torque can be calculated as the torque against the ICOR at that moment

1

2 3 4 5

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

3

Figure 3 Instant center of rotation

ICOR of an orbital gerotor inner gear can be found by checking the velocity distribution on the

inner rotor As shown in Figure 4 all the points on the inner gear undergo a composite motion a)

translation with the motion of the gear center and b) rotation around the gear center with speed in

The inner gear center itself rotates around the outer gear center with the speed of c As mentioned

previously the relationship between the two rotation speeds is

(1)

As shown in figure 4 we can always draw a line (line of symmetry) connecting the inner gear

center and the outer gear center at any moment of time Defining a right-hand coordinate system with

the origin at the inner gear center the y axis along the symmetry line and the x axis in a direction

perpendicular to the y axis enables the velocity of the inner gear center in x and y directions to be

defined as

(2)

(3)

where Ec is the eccentricity of the inner gear or the distance between the inner gear center and the

outer gear center For any point on inner gear with coordinates (x y) the velocity components for

rotation around the inner gear center are

(4)

(5)

and the combined velocities are

(6)

(7)

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

4

From equation (6) and (7) it is clear that at the point (0 ) both velocity components equal

zero Therefore that point corresponds to the coordinates of the instant center of rotation Since the

line of symmetry rotates around the outer gear center at the speed of c it is very straight forward to

calculate ICOR during the simulation

23 Mesh Solution

Similarly the motion of the inner gear boundary can be determined through the composite motion of

the rotation around the inner gear center plus the translation of the inner gear center The shape of the

fluid volume for the rotor is then properly defined

Meshing of movingdeforming fluid domains in a positive displacement (PD) fluid machine is

always very challenging As a typical PD machine gerotor motor has many dynamic fluid gaps with

very small clearances down to several microns Those gaps have a strong influence on machinersquos

performance including flow leakage and volumetric efficiency flow and pressure ripple pressure lock

cavitation and erosion and torque and power Therefore they have to be modeled accurately Many

generic moving mesh solutions for example the immersed boundary method have difficulties in

modeling such dynamic gaps So far the most successful solution for creating a gerotor rotor mesh is

the structured movingsliding mesh approach commonly used in normal gerotor pump simulations

(Jiang and Perng [2]) This approach is also adapted in this study

In the structured movingsliding mesh approach the fluid volume of the rotor chamber is separated

from the other parts of the fluid domain Topologically the rotor volume is similar to a ring and an

initial structured mesh can be easily created for that kind of shape The rotor mesh will be connected

to other fluid volumes through sliding interfaces When the inner gear surface moves to a new position

the mesh on the surface of the inner gear does not simply move with the inner gear surface Instead

the mesh ldquoslidesrdquo on the inner gear surface while make the necessary adjustments to conform to the

new clearance between the inner gear surface and the outer gear surface Simultaneously the interface

connections between the rotor volume and other fluid volumes are updated Figure 3 shows a typical

structured mesh for a gerotor rotor volume

Figure 4 Gerotor rotor structured mesh

24 Implementation

The proposed orbital gerotor model was implemented in the commercial CFD package PumpLinxreg

as

a new template A template in PumpLinx provides two main functionalities 1) It creates the initial

rotor mesh and controls mesh moving deformation of the rotor and other dynamic fluid volumes

during the simulation and 2) It provides special setup and post processing options for that specific

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

5

fluid machine With the help of the template user can setup a complete orbital gerotor motor in less

than 30 minutes starting from proper CAD geometry output One can refer to Ding et al [8] for a more

detailed description of the software

3 CFD Solver and Governing Equations

The CFD package used in this study solves conservation equations of mass and momentum using a

finite volume approach Those conservation laws can be written in integral representation as

(8)

(9)

The standard k two-equation model (Launder amp Spalding [9]) is used to account for turbulence

(10)

(11)

The cavitation model included in the software describes the cavitation vapor distribution using the

following formulation (Singhal et al [10])

(12)

where is the diffusivity of the vapor mass fraction and f is the turbulent Schmidt number The effects

of liquid vapor non-condensable gas (typically air) and liquid compressibility are all accounted for in

the model The final density calculation for the mixture is done by

(13)

This software package has been successfully used in CFD simulations for many different types of

positive displacement machines including swash plate piston pump [11] gerotor pump [8] external

gear pump [12] crescent pump [7] and variable displacement vane pump [13]

4 Gerotor Motor Test Case

An industrial orbital gerotor motor was used to demonstrate the proposed CFD model Figure 5 is the

solid model of the motor This motor has two ports port A and port B The inner gear and flow

distributor can also rotate in both directions without mechanical adjustment The flow and rotation

directions are determined by which port is connected to the high pressure fluid and which port is

connected to the low pressure fluid The one connected to the high pressure fluid becomes the inlet

and the rotation direction will also change accordingly

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

6

Figure 5 Solid model of an orbital gerotor motor

The fluid domain was subtracted from CAD geometry and divided into several volumes and

meshed separately (Figure 6) Except for the rotor part which was created with structured mesh all

other fluid volumes were meshed with unstructured binary tree mesh The special movingsliding

mesh of rotor volume and the rotation of flow distributor volume were automatically processed by the

template and the rest of the fluid volumes stayed stationary during the simulation Those independent

volumes were connected through sliding interfaces during simulation A total of 360000 cells was

used in this model

Figure 6 Fluid volumes with mesh

The working fluid used in the model is the high performance anti-wear hydraulic fluid HM46 The

properties of HM46 are listed in Table 1 Determined based on the information provided by motor

manufacturer operating conditions used in simulation are also listed in table 1

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

7

Table 1 Fluid properties and operating conditions

Density (kgm3) 879

Viscosity (PaS) 004

Rotation speed (RPM) 100

Inlet pressure (MPa) 1

Outlet pressure (MPa) 16

5 Simulation Results and Discussion

Figure 7 shows the pressure distribution of high pressure inlet low pressure outlet and the flow

distributor The magenta color indicates high pressure and the blue color indicates low pressure with

an overall pressure range from 0 to 18 MPa

Figure 7 Pressure distribution on inletoutlet ports and flow distributor

The flow distributor for this motor has a total of 16 shoe shaped connectors to be connected to the

rotor fluid pockets Eight of the connectors connect to the low pressure outlet and the other eight

connect to the high pressure inlet The connectors are arranged alternately and rotate at the same speed

as the inner gear to create the proper timing of the connections

Figure 8 shows the simulation results at 4 different moments In the picture surfaces are colored by

pressure with red representing high pressure and blue representing low pressure with an overall range

from 0 to 20 MPa Small spheres in those pictures are massless particles used to visualize the flow

field The white lines extruding from the particles show the direction and magnitude of the velocity of

each particle One can see that the red particles coming from the high pressure inlet are drawn into

the rotor And the blue particles after the pockets connect to the low pressure port are driven away

from the rotor towards the outlet

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

8

Figure 8 Pressure distribution and particle tracing

Figures 9 to 12 plot the time history of the pressure in one of the fluid pocket the mass flow rate

the power applied to the inner gear and the torque applied to the inner gear These curves correspond

to a 100 RPM rotation speed for one complete revolution of the inner gear The horizontal axis for

these plots is the rotation angle of the inner gear

Figure 9 Pressure in a fluid pocket

Figure 10 Mass flow rate

The plots show that the solution has a clear periodical pattern except in the first couple of time

steps The pattern repeats itself every time the inner gear advances one tooth This means that under

the current simulation conditions one only needs to solve 2 to 3 inner gear teeth rotation or 90 to 135

degree of the inner gear rotation to have a complete set of flow characteristics of the motor The

transient simulation time to model one gear tooth rotation for these simulation conditions is about 35

minutes on a quad-core single CPU 22GHZ I7 2720QM Laptop Computer

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

9

Figure 11 Hydraulic power

Figure 12 Torque

Experimental test samples provided by the manufacturer have rotational speeds ranging from 103

to 117RPM and pressure differences ranging from 15 to 17 MPa For this type of motor the flow rate

is a linear function of the rotation speed and the torque is a linear function of the pressure difference

In order to have a fair comparison the test flow rates are linearly converted to 100 RPM and the test

torques are linearly converted to15 MPa pressure difference The converted volume flow rate and

output torque of 41 test samples are plotted in figure 13 and 14 against the CFD simulation results

The horizontal axis of the two plots is test sample number The plots show that the CFD flow rate

prediction matches very well with the test data The predicted torque is about 12 higher than the test

results Since torque measured in the experiment is the final output torque from the motor it has

mechanical and friction loses that are not accounted for in CFD results This could be the main reason

for the discrepancy in CFD torque prediction

Figure 13 Comparison of predicted and test flow

rate

Figure 14 Comparison of predicted and test

torque

Figures 15 and 16 plot the flow rate and power vs rotation speed respectively As expected both

the flow rate and the power are linearly increasing with the rotation speed

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

10

Figure 15 Flow rate vs rotation speed Figure 16 Power vs rotation speed

Figure 17 plots the torque vs the rotational speed From this plot one can see that the torque of

orbital gerotor motor is not a strong function of rotational speed However the torque does decrease

slightly when the rotational speed increases

Figure 17 Torque vs rotation speed

6 Conclusions

By analyzing the working mechanism of orbital gerotor motors a CFD model for such fluid machine

was developed and implemented as a new template in the CFD software PumpLinx Simulation for a

production motor shows that the present computational model is accurate and efficient Itrsquos also found

that the flow solver used in the current study is very robust in handling very high mesh aspect ratios

and very small dynamic leakage gaps With the demonstrated speed robustness and accuracy this

model can be used as a high fidelity design tool in the design process or as a diagnosis tool for orbital

gerotor motors

Nomenclature

c

C1

C2

Cc

Ce

C

Df

Ec

f

fv

Inner gear center

Turbulence model constant

Turbulence model constant

Cavitation model constant

Cavitation model constant

Turbulence model constant

Diffusivity of vapor mass fraction

Inner gear eccentricity

Body force (N)

Vapor mass fraction

t

Sij

U

u

u

v

v vx vy x y

Time

Strain tensor

Initial velocity

Velocity component (ms)

Component of v

Velocity vector

Turbulent fluctuation velocity

Velocity in x y direction

Coordinates

Turbulence dissipation

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

11

fg

Gt

ICOR

in

k

L

M

NT

n p

Q

Rc

Re

RPM

Non-condensable gas mass fraction

Turbulent generation term

Instant center of rotation

Inner gear

Turbulence kinetic energy

Length

Mass flow rate (Kgs)

Number of gear teeth

Surface normal

Pressure (Pa)

Flow rate (m3h)

Vapor condensation rate

Vapor generation rate

Revolution per minute

t g l v k l f

Fluid viscosity (Pa-s)

Turbulent viscosity (Pa-s)

Fluid density (kgm3)

Gas density (kgm3)

Liquid density (kgm3)

Vapor density (kgm3)

Surface of control volume

Turbulence model constant

Surface tension

Turbulence model constant

Turbulent Schmidt numberStress tensor

Control volume

Rotation speed

References

[1] Ivantysyn J and Ivantysnova M 2003 Hydrostatic Pumps and Motors (New Delhi

Tech Books International)

[2] Jiang Y and Perng C 1997 An Efficient 3D Transient Computational Model for Vane Oil Pump

and Gerotor Oil Pump Simulations SAE Technical Paper 970841

[3] Kini S Mapara N Thoms R and Chang P 2005 Numerical Simulation of Cover Plate Deflection

in the Gerotor Pump SAE Technical Paper 2005-01-1917

[4] Zhang D Perng C and Laverty M 2006 Gerotor Oil Pump Performance and FlowPressure

Ripple Study SAE Technical Paper 2006-01-0359

[5] Natchimuthu K Sureshkumar J and Ganesan V 2010 CFD Analysis of Flow through a Gerotor

Oil Pump SAE Technical Paper 2010-01-1111

[6] Ruvalcaba M A and Hu X Gerotor Fuel Pump Performance and Leakage Study ASME 2011 Int

Mechanical Engineering Congress amp Exposition (Denver Colorado USA 2011)

[7] Jiang Y Furmanczyk M Lowry S and Zhang D et al 2008 A Three-Dimensional Design Tool

for Crescent Oil Pumps SAE Technical Paper 2008-01-0003

[8] Ding H Visser F C Jiang Y and Furmanczyk M 2011 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 133(1)

011101

[9] Launder B E and Spalding D B 1974 Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 3 269-289

[10] Singhal A K Athavale M M Li H Y and Jiang Y 2002 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 124(3)

617-624

[11] Meincke O and Rahmfeld R 2008 6th Int Fluid Power Conf (Dresden 1-2 April 2008) 485-99

[12] Heisler A Moskwa J and Fronczak F 2009 The Design of Low-Inertia High-Speed External

Gear PumpMotors for Hydrostatic Dynamometer Systems SAE Technical Paper 2009-01-

1117

[13] Wang D Ding H Jiang Y and Xiang X 2012 Numerical Modeling of Vane Oil Pump with

Variable Displacement SAE Technical Paper 2012-01-0637

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

12

Page 4: A CFD model for orbital gerotor motor - IOPscience

Figure 1 Orbital gerotor motor

Each cavity between neighboring outer gear teeth bounded by the inner gear surface forms a fluid

ldquopocketrdquo During the operation those fluid pockets change shape and volume When the volume

increases it will draw in fluid When the volume decreases it will drive the fluid out Combined with

proper connections with the inlet and the outlet ports those dynamically changing pockets will move

the fluid from the inlet to the outlet while at the same time outputting torque and power to the shaft

Figure 2 shows the complete shape change sequences of one of the pockets when the inner gear

advances one tooth over the outer gear The plots 21 to 25 show the sequences of the expansion half

cycle and 26 to 210 show the compression half cycle

Unlike a normal gerotor where the fluid ldquopocketsrdquo are rotating and the inlet and outlet ports are

stationary for orbiting gerotor those fluid ldquopocketsrdquo stay in the same location during the operation In

order to provide proper timing for the connections with the inlet and the outlet typically there is a

rotating distributor to create dynamic bridges between the ports and the rotor The purpose of the

distributor is to connect each pocket to the high pressure inlet during its expansion half cycle and to

the low pressure outlet during its compression half cycle Typically the flow distributor rotates at the

same speed as the inner gear Extra caution needs to be taken when creating fluid volumes for the flow

distributor and the rotor It is important to make sure that the initial relative position between the inner

gear and the distributor is accurate otherwise the motor system may not work as expected

Figure 2 Shape and volume change sequence of one fluid pocket

22 Instant Center of Rotation

Since the inner gear of an orbiting gerotor does not have a fixed rotation axis calculating the hydraulic

torque applied to the inner gear becomes an issue One way to resolve this issue is to find the

instantaneous center of rotation of the inner gear For a body undergoing planar movement the

instantaneous center of rotation (ICOR) is the point where the velocity is zero at a particular instance

of time At that instance the body is doing a pure rotation around the ICOR If the ICOR is known the

hydraulic torque can be calculated as the torque against the ICOR at that moment

1

2 3 4 5

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

3

Figure 3 Instant center of rotation

ICOR of an orbital gerotor inner gear can be found by checking the velocity distribution on the

inner rotor As shown in Figure 4 all the points on the inner gear undergo a composite motion a)

translation with the motion of the gear center and b) rotation around the gear center with speed in

The inner gear center itself rotates around the outer gear center with the speed of c As mentioned

previously the relationship between the two rotation speeds is

(1)

As shown in figure 4 we can always draw a line (line of symmetry) connecting the inner gear

center and the outer gear center at any moment of time Defining a right-hand coordinate system with

the origin at the inner gear center the y axis along the symmetry line and the x axis in a direction

perpendicular to the y axis enables the velocity of the inner gear center in x and y directions to be

defined as

(2)

(3)

where Ec is the eccentricity of the inner gear or the distance between the inner gear center and the

outer gear center For any point on inner gear with coordinates (x y) the velocity components for

rotation around the inner gear center are

(4)

(5)

and the combined velocities are

(6)

(7)

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

4

From equation (6) and (7) it is clear that at the point (0 ) both velocity components equal

zero Therefore that point corresponds to the coordinates of the instant center of rotation Since the

line of symmetry rotates around the outer gear center at the speed of c it is very straight forward to

calculate ICOR during the simulation

23 Mesh Solution

Similarly the motion of the inner gear boundary can be determined through the composite motion of

the rotation around the inner gear center plus the translation of the inner gear center The shape of the

fluid volume for the rotor is then properly defined

Meshing of movingdeforming fluid domains in a positive displacement (PD) fluid machine is

always very challenging As a typical PD machine gerotor motor has many dynamic fluid gaps with

very small clearances down to several microns Those gaps have a strong influence on machinersquos

performance including flow leakage and volumetric efficiency flow and pressure ripple pressure lock

cavitation and erosion and torque and power Therefore they have to be modeled accurately Many

generic moving mesh solutions for example the immersed boundary method have difficulties in

modeling such dynamic gaps So far the most successful solution for creating a gerotor rotor mesh is

the structured movingsliding mesh approach commonly used in normal gerotor pump simulations

(Jiang and Perng [2]) This approach is also adapted in this study

In the structured movingsliding mesh approach the fluid volume of the rotor chamber is separated

from the other parts of the fluid domain Topologically the rotor volume is similar to a ring and an

initial structured mesh can be easily created for that kind of shape The rotor mesh will be connected

to other fluid volumes through sliding interfaces When the inner gear surface moves to a new position

the mesh on the surface of the inner gear does not simply move with the inner gear surface Instead

the mesh ldquoslidesrdquo on the inner gear surface while make the necessary adjustments to conform to the

new clearance between the inner gear surface and the outer gear surface Simultaneously the interface

connections between the rotor volume and other fluid volumes are updated Figure 3 shows a typical

structured mesh for a gerotor rotor volume

Figure 4 Gerotor rotor structured mesh

24 Implementation

The proposed orbital gerotor model was implemented in the commercial CFD package PumpLinxreg

as

a new template A template in PumpLinx provides two main functionalities 1) It creates the initial

rotor mesh and controls mesh moving deformation of the rotor and other dynamic fluid volumes

during the simulation and 2) It provides special setup and post processing options for that specific

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

5

fluid machine With the help of the template user can setup a complete orbital gerotor motor in less

than 30 minutes starting from proper CAD geometry output One can refer to Ding et al [8] for a more

detailed description of the software

3 CFD Solver and Governing Equations

The CFD package used in this study solves conservation equations of mass and momentum using a

finite volume approach Those conservation laws can be written in integral representation as

(8)

(9)

The standard k two-equation model (Launder amp Spalding [9]) is used to account for turbulence

(10)

(11)

The cavitation model included in the software describes the cavitation vapor distribution using the

following formulation (Singhal et al [10])

(12)

where is the diffusivity of the vapor mass fraction and f is the turbulent Schmidt number The effects

of liquid vapor non-condensable gas (typically air) and liquid compressibility are all accounted for in

the model The final density calculation for the mixture is done by

(13)

This software package has been successfully used in CFD simulations for many different types of

positive displacement machines including swash plate piston pump [11] gerotor pump [8] external

gear pump [12] crescent pump [7] and variable displacement vane pump [13]

4 Gerotor Motor Test Case

An industrial orbital gerotor motor was used to demonstrate the proposed CFD model Figure 5 is the

solid model of the motor This motor has two ports port A and port B The inner gear and flow

distributor can also rotate in both directions without mechanical adjustment The flow and rotation

directions are determined by which port is connected to the high pressure fluid and which port is

connected to the low pressure fluid The one connected to the high pressure fluid becomes the inlet

and the rotation direction will also change accordingly

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

6

Figure 5 Solid model of an orbital gerotor motor

The fluid domain was subtracted from CAD geometry and divided into several volumes and

meshed separately (Figure 6) Except for the rotor part which was created with structured mesh all

other fluid volumes were meshed with unstructured binary tree mesh The special movingsliding

mesh of rotor volume and the rotation of flow distributor volume were automatically processed by the

template and the rest of the fluid volumes stayed stationary during the simulation Those independent

volumes were connected through sliding interfaces during simulation A total of 360000 cells was

used in this model

Figure 6 Fluid volumes with mesh

The working fluid used in the model is the high performance anti-wear hydraulic fluid HM46 The

properties of HM46 are listed in Table 1 Determined based on the information provided by motor

manufacturer operating conditions used in simulation are also listed in table 1

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

7

Table 1 Fluid properties and operating conditions

Density (kgm3) 879

Viscosity (PaS) 004

Rotation speed (RPM) 100

Inlet pressure (MPa) 1

Outlet pressure (MPa) 16

5 Simulation Results and Discussion

Figure 7 shows the pressure distribution of high pressure inlet low pressure outlet and the flow

distributor The magenta color indicates high pressure and the blue color indicates low pressure with

an overall pressure range from 0 to 18 MPa

Figure 7 Pressure distribution on inletoutlet ports and flow distributor

The flow distributor for this motor has a total of 16 shoe shaped connectors to be connected to the

rotor fluid pockets Eight of the connectors connect to the low pressure outlet and the other eight

connect to the high pressure inlet The connectors are arranged alternately and rotate at the same speed

as the inner gear to create the proper timing of the connections

Figure 8 shows the simulation results at 4 different moments In the picture surfaces are colored by

pressure with red representing high pressure and blue representing low pressure with an overall range

from 0 to 20 MPa Small spheres in those pictures are massless particles used to visualize the flow

field The white lines extruding from the particles show the direction and magnitude of the velocity of

each particle One can see that the red particles coming from the high pressure inlet are drawn into

the rotor And the blue particles after the pockets connect to the low pressure port are driven away

from the rotor towards the outlet

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

8

Figure 8 Pressure distribution and particle tracing

Figures 9 to 12 plot the time history of the pressure in one of the fluid pocket the mass flow rate

the power applied to the inner gear and the torque applied to the inner gear These curves correspond

to a 100 RPM rotation speed for one complete revolution of the inner gear The horizontal axis for

these plots is the rotation angle of the inner gear

Figure 9 Pressure in a fluid pocket

Figure 10 Mass flow rate

The plots show that the solution has a clear periodical pattern except in the first couple of time

steps The pattern repeats itself every time the inner gear advances one tooth This means that under

the current simulation conditions one only needs to solve 2 to 3 inner gear teeth rotation or 90 to 135

degree of the inner gear rotation to have a complete set of flow characteristics of the motor The

transient simulation time to model one gear tooth rotation for these simulation conditions is about 35

minutes on a quad-core single CPU 22GHZ I7 2720QM Laptop Computer

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

9

Figure 11 Hydraulic power

Figure 12 Torque

Experimental test samples provided by the manufacturer have rotational speeds ranging from 103

to 117RPM and pressure differences ranging from 15 to 17 MPa For this type of motor the flow rate

is a linear function of the rotation speed and the torque is a linear function of the pressure difference

In order to have a fair comparison the test flow rates are linearly converted to 100 RPM and the test

torques are linearly converted to15 MPa pressure difference The converted volume flow rate and

output torque of 41 test samples are plotted in figure 13 and 14 against the CFD simulation results

The horizontal axis of the two plots is test sample number The plots show that the CFD flow rate

prediction matches very well with the test data The predicted torque is about 12 higher than the test

results Since torque measured in the experiment is the final output torque from the motor it has

mechanical and friction loses that are not accounted for in CFD results This could be the main reason

for the discrepancy in CFD torque prediction

Figure 13 Comparison of predicted and test flow

rate

Figure 14 Comparison of predicted and test

torque

Figures 15 and 16 plot the flow rate and power vs rotation speed respectively As expected both

the flow rate and the power are linearly increasing with the rotation speed

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

10

Figure 15 Flow rate vs rotation speed Figure 16 Power vs rotation speed

Figure 17 plots the torque vs the rotational speed From this plot one can see that the torque of

orbital gerotor motor is not a strong function of rotational speed However the torque does decrease

slightly when the rotational speed increases

Figure 17 Torque vs rotation speed

6 Conclusions

By analyzing the working mechanism of orbital gerotor motors a CFD model for such fluid machine

was developed and implemented as a new template in the CFD software PumpLinx Simulation for a

production motor shows that the present computational model is accurate and efficient Itrsquos also found

that the flow solver used in the current study is very robust in handling very high mesh aspect ratios

and very small dynamic leakage gaps With the demonstrated speed robustness and accuracy this

model can be used as a high fidelity design tool in the design process or as a diagnosis tool for orbital

gerotor motors

Nomenclature

c

C1

C2

Cc

Ce

C

Df

Ec

f

fv

Inner gear center

Turbulence model constant

Turbulence model constant

Cavitation model constant

Cavitation model constant

Turbulence model constant

Diffusivity of vapor mass fraction

Inner gear eccentricity

Body force (N)

Vapor mass fraction

t

Sij

U

u

u

v

v vx vy x y

Time

Strain tensor

Initial velocity

Velocity component (ms)

Component of v

Velocity vector

Turbulent fluctuation velocity

Velocity in x y direction

Coordinates

Turbulence dissipation

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

11

fg

Gt

ICOR

in

k

L

M

NT

n p

Q

Rc

Re

RPM

Non-condensable gas mass fraction

Turbulent generation term

Instant center of rotation

Inner gear

Turbulence kinetic energy

Length

Mass flow rate (Kgs)

Number of gear teeth

Surface normal

Pressure (Pa)

Flow rate (m3h)

Vapor condensation rate

Vapor generation rate

Revolution per minute

t g l v k l f

Fluid viscosity (Pa-s)

Turbulent viscosity (Pa-s)

Fluid density (kgm3)

Gas density (kgm3)

Liquid density (kgm3)

Vapor density (kgm3)

Surface of control volume

Turbulence model constant

Surface tension

Turbulence model constant

Turbulent Schmidt numberStress tensor

Control volume

Rotation speed

References

[1] Ivantysyn J and Ivantysnova M 2003 Hydrostatic Pumps and Motors (New Delhi

Tech Books International)

[2] Jiang Y and Perng C 1997 An Efficient 3D Transient Computational Model for Vane Oil Pump

and Gerotor Oil Pump Simulations SAE Technical Paper 970841

[3] Kini S Mapara N Thoms R and Chang P 2005 Numerical Simulation of Cover Plate Deflection

in the Gerotor Pump SAE Technical Paper 2005-01-1917

[4] Zhang D Perng C and Laverty M 2006 Gerotor Oil Pump Performance and FlowPressure

Ripple Study SAE Technical Paper 2006-01-0359

[5] Natchimuthu K Sureshkumar J and Ganesan V 2010 CFD Analysis of Flow through a Gerotor

Oil Pump SAE Technical Paper 2010-01-1111

[6] Ruvalcaba M A and Hu X Gerotor Fuel Pump Performance and Leakage Study ASME 2011 Int

Mechanical Engineering Congress amp Exposition (Denver Colorado USA 2011)

[7] Jiang Y Furmanczyk M Lowry S and Zhang D et al 2008 A Three-Dimensional Design Tool

for Crescent Oil Pumps SAE Technical Paper 2008-01-0003

[8] Ding H Visser F C Jiang Y and Furmanczyk M 2011 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 133(1)

011101

[9] Launder B E and Spalding D B 1974 Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 3 269-289

[10] Singhal A K Athavale M M Li H Y and Jiang Y 2002 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 124(3)

617-624

[11] Meincke O and Rahmfeld R 2008 6th Int Fluid Power Conf (Dresden 1-2 April 2008) 485-99

[12] Heisler A Moskwa J and Fronczak F 2009 The Design of Low-Inertia High-Speed External

Gear PumpMotors for Hydrostatic Dynamometer Systems SAE Technical Paper 2009-01-

1117

[13] Wang D Ding H Jiang Y and Xiang X 2012 Numerical Modeling of Vane Oil Pump with

Variable Displacement SAE Technical Paper 2012-01-0637

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

12

Page 5: A CFD model for orbital gerotor motor - IOPscience

Figure 3 Instant center of rotation

ICOR of an orbital gerotor inner gear can be found by checking the velocity distribution on the

inner rotor As shown in Figure 4 all the points on the inner gear undergo a composite motion a)

translation with the motion of the gear center and b) rotation around the gear center with speed in

The inner gear center itself rotates around the outer gear center with the speed of c As mentioned

previously the relationship between the two rotation speeds is

(1)

As shown in figure 4 we can always draw a line (line of symmetry) connecting the inner gear

center and the outer gear center at any moment of time Defining a right-hand coordinate system with

the origin at the inner gear center the y axis along the symmetry line and the x axis in a direction

perpendicular to the y axis enables the velocity of the inner gear center in x and y directions to be

defined as

(2)

(3)

where Ec is the eccentricity of the inner gear or the distance between the inner gear center and the

outer gear center For any point on inner gear with coordinates (x y) the velocity components for

rotation around the inner gear center are

(4)

(5)

and the combined velocities are

(6)

(7)

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

4

From equation (6) and (7) it is clear that at the point (0 ) both velocity components equal

zero Therefore that point corresponds to the coordinates of the instant center of rotation Since the

line of symmetry rotates around the outer gear center at the speed of c it is very straight forward to

calculate ICOR during the simulation

23 Mesh Solution

Similarly the motion of the inner gear boundary can be determined through the composite motion of

the rotation around the inner gear center plus the translation of the inner gear center The shape of the

fluid volume for the rotor is then properly defined

Meshing of movingdeforming fluid domains in a positive displacement (PD) fluid machine is

always very challenging As a typical PD machine gerotor motor has many dynamic fluid gaps with

very small clearances down to several microns Those gaps have a strong influence on machinersquos

performance including flow leakage and volumetric efficiency flow and pressure ripple pressure lock

cavitation and erosion and torque and power Therefore they have to be modeled accurately Many

generic moving mesh solutions for example the immersed boundary method have difficulties in

modeling such dynamic gaps So far the most successful solution for creating a gerotor rotor mesh is

the structured movingsliding mesh approach commonly used in normal gerotor pump simulations

(Jiang and Perng [2]) This approach is also adapted in this study

In the structured movingsliding mesh approach the fluid volume of the rotor chamber is separated

from the other parts of the fluid domain Topologically the rotor volume is similar to a ring and an

initial structured mesh can be easily created for that kind of shape The rotor mesh will be connected

to other fluid volumes through sliding interfaces When the inner gear surface moves to a new position

the mesh on the surface of the inner gear does not simply move with the inner gear surface Instead

the mesh ldquoslidesrdquo on the inner gear surface while make the necessary adjustments to conform to the

new clearance between the inner gear surface and the outer gear surface Simultaneously the interface

connections between the rotor volume and other fluid volumes are updated Figure 3 shows a typical

structured mesh for a gerotor rotor volume

Figure 4 Gerotor rotor structured mesh

24 Implementation

The proposed orbital gerotor model was implemented in the commercial CFD package PumpLinxreg

as

a new template A template in PumpLinx provides two main functionalities 1) It creates the initial

rotor mesh and controls mesh moving deformation of the rotor and other dynamic fluid volumes

during the simulation and 2) It provides special setup and post processing options for that specific

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

5

fluid machine With the help of the template user can setup a complete orbital gerotor motor in less

than 30 minutes starting from proper CAD geometry output One can refer to Ding et al [8] for a more

detailed description of the software

3 CFD Solver and Governing Equations

The CFD package used in this study solves conservation equations of mass and momentum using a

finite volume approach Those conservation laws can be written in integral representation as

(8)

(9)

The standard k two-equation model (Launder amp Spalding [9]) is used to account for turbulence

(10)

(11)

The cavitation model included in the software describes the cavitation vapor distribution using the

following formulation (Singhal et al [10])

(12)

where is the diffusivity of the vapor mass fraction and f is the turbulent Schmidt number The effects

of liquid vapor non-condensable gas (typically air) and liquid compressibility are all accounted for in

the model The final density calculation for the mixture is done by

(13)

This software package has been successfully used in CFD simulations for many different types of

positive displacement machines including swash plate piston pump [11] gerotor pump [8] external

gear pump [12] crescent pump [7] and variable displacement vane pump [13]

4 Gerotor Motor Test Case

An industrial orbital gerotor motor was used to demonstrate the proposed CFD model Figure 5 is the

solid model of the motor This motor has two ports port A and port B The inner gear and flow

distributor can also rotate in both directions without mechanical adjustment The flow and rotation

directions are determined by which port is connected to the high pressure fluid and which port is

connected to the low pressure fluid The one connected to the high pressure fluid becomes the inlet

and the rotation direction will also change accordingly

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

6

Figure 5 Solid model of an orbital gerotor motor

The fluid domain was subtracted from CAD geometry and divided into several volumes and

meshed separately (Figure 6) Except for the rotor part which was created with structured mesh all

other fluid volumes were meshed with unstructured binary tree mesh The special movingsliding

mesh of rotor volume and the rotation of flow distributor volume were automatically processed by the

template and the rest of the fluid volumes stayed stationary during the simulation Those independent

volumes were connected through sliding interfaces during simulation A total of 360000 cells was

used in this model

Figure 6 Fluid volumes with mesh

The working fluid used in the model is the high performance anti-wear hydraulic fluid HM46 The

properties of HM46 are listed in Table 1 Determined based on the information provided by motor

manufacturer operating conditions used in simulation are also listed in table 1

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

7

Table 1 Fluid properties and operating conditions

Density (kgm3) 879

Viscosity (PaS) 004

Rotation speed (RPM) 100

Inlet pressure (MPa) 1

Outlet pressure (MPa) 16

5 Simulation Results and Discussion

Figure 7 shows the pressure distribution of high pressure inlet low pressure outlet and the flow

distributor The magenta color indicates high pressure and the blue color indicates low pressure with

an overall pressure range from 0 to 18 MPa

Figure 7 Pressure distribution on inletoutlet ports and flow distributor

The flow distributor for this motor has a total of 16 shoe shaped connectors to be connected to the

rotor fluid pockets Eight of the connectors connect to the low pressure outlet and the other eight

connect to the high pressure inlet The connectors are arranged alternately and rotate at the same speed

as the inner gear to create the proper timing of the connections

Figure 8 shows the simulation results at 4 different moments In the picture surfaces are colored by

pressure with red representing high pressure and blue representing low pressure with an overall range

from 0 to 20 MPa Small spheres in those pictures are massless particles used to visualize the flow

field The white lines extruding from the particles show the direction and magnitude of the velocity of

each particle One can see that the red particles coming from the high pressure inlet are drawn into

the rotor And the blue particles after the pockets connect to the low pressure port are driven away

from the rotor towards the outlet

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

8

Figure 8 Pressure distribution and particle tracing

Figures 9 to 12 plot the time history of the pressure in one of the fluid pocket the mass flow rate

the power applied to the inner gear and the torque applied to the inner gear These curves correspond

to a 100 RPM rotation speed for one complete revolution of the inner gear The horizontal axis for

these plots is the rotation angle of the inner gear

Figure 9 Pressure in a fluid pocket

Figure 10 Mass flow rate

The plots show that the solution has a clear periodical pattern except in the first couple of time

steps The pattern repeats itself every time the inner gear advances one tooth This means that under

the current simulation conditions one only needs to solve 2 to 3 inner gear teeth rotation or 90 to 135

degree of the inner gear rotation to have a complete set of flow characteristics of the motor The

transient simulation time to model one gear tooth rotation for these simulation conditions is about 35

minutes on a quad-core single CPU 22GHZ I7 2720QM Laptop Computer

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

9

Figure 11 Hydraulic power

Figure 12 Torque

Experimental test samples provided by the manufacturer have rotational speeds ranging from 103

to 117RPM and pressure differences ranging from 15 to 17 MPa For this type of motor the flow rate

is a linear function of the rotation speed and the torque is a linear function of the pressure difference

In order to have a fair comparison the test flow rates are linearly converted to 100 RPM and the test

torques are linearly converted to15 MPa pressure difference The converted volume flow rate and

output torque of 41 test samples are plotted in figure 13 and 14 against the CFD simulation results

The horizontal axis of the two plots is test sample number The plots show that the CFD flow rate

prediction matches very well with the test data The predicted torque is about 12 higher than the test

results Since torque measured in the experiment is the final output torque from the motor it has

mechanical and friction loses that are not accounted for in CFD results This could be the main reason

for the discrepancy in CFD torque prediction

Figure 13 Comparison of predicted and test flow

rate

Figure 14 Comparison of predicted and test

torque

Figures 15 and 16 plot the flow rate and power vs rotation speed respectively As expected both

the flow rate and the power are linearly increasing with the rotation speed

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

10

Figure 15 Flow rate vs rotation speed Figure 16 Power vs rotation speed

Figure 17 plots the torque vs the rotational speed From this plot one can see that the torque of

orbital gerotor motor is not a strong function of rotational speed However the torque does decrease

slightly when the rotational speed increases

Figure 17 Torque vs rotation speed

6 Conclusions

By analyzing the working mechanism of orbital gerotor motors a CFD model for such fluid machine

was developed and implemented as a new template in the CFD software PumpLinx Simulation for a

production motor shows that the present computational model is accurate and efficient Itrsquos also found

that the flow solver used in the current study is very robust in handling very high mesh aspect ratios

and very small dynamic leakage gaps With the demonstrated speed robustness and accuracy this

model can be used as a high fidelity design tool in the design process or as a diagnosis tool for orbital

gerotor motors

Nomenclature

c

C1

C2

Cc

Ce

C

Df

Ec

f

fv

Inner gear center

Turbulence model constant

Turbulence model constant

Cavitation model constant

Cavitation model constant

Turbulence model constant

Diffusivity of vapor mass fraction

Inner gear eccentricity

Body force (N)

Vapor mass fraction

t

Sij

U

u

u

v

v vx vy x y

Time

Strain tensor

Initial velocity

Velocity component (ms)

Component of v

Velocity vector

Turbulent fluctuation velocity

Velocity in x y direction

Coordinates

Turbulence dissipation

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

11

fg

Gt

ICOR

in

k

L

M

NT

n p

Q

Rc

Re

RPM

Non-condensable gas mass fraction

Turbulent generation term

Instant center of rotation

Inner gear

Turbulence kinetic energy

Length

Mass flow rate (Kgs)

Number of gear teeth

Surface normal

Pressure (Pa)

Flow rate (m3h)

Vapor condensation rate

Vapor generation rate

Revolution per minute

t g l v k l f

Fluid viscosity (Pa-s)

Turbulent viscosity (Pa-s)

Fluid density (kgm3)

Gas density (kgm3)

Liquid density (kgm3)

Vapor density (kgm3)

Surface of control volume

Turbulence model constant

Surface tension

Turbulence model constant

Turbulent Schmidt numberStress tensor

Control volume

Rotation speed

References

[1] Ivantysyn J and Ivantysnova M 2003 Hydrostatic Pumps and Motors (New Delhi

Tech Books International)

[2] Jiang Y and Perng C 1997 An Efficient 3D Transient Computational Model for Vane Oil Pump

and Gerotor Oil Pump Simulations SAE Technical Paper 970841

[3] Kini S Mapara N Thoms R and Chang P 2005 Numerical Simulation of Cover Plate Deflection

in the Gerotor Pump SAE Technical Paper 2005-01-1917

[4] Zhang D Perng C and Laverty M 2006 Gerotor Oil Pump Performance and FlowPressure

Ripple Study SAE Technical Paper 2006-01-0359

[5] Natchimuthu K Sureshkumar J and Ganesan V 2010 CFD Analysis of Flow through a Gerotor

Oil Pump SAE Technical Paper 2010-01-1111

[6] Ruvalcaba M A and Hu X Gerotor Fuel Pump Performance and Leakage Study ASME 2011 Int

Mechanical Engineering Congress amp Exposition (Denver Colorado USA 2011)

[7] Jiang Y Furmanczyk M Lowry S and Zhang D et al 2008 A Three-Dimensional Design Tool

for Crescent Oil Pumps SAE Technical Paper 2008-01-0003

[8] Ding H Visser F C Jiang Y and Furmanczyk M 2011 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 133(1)

011101

[9] Launder B E and Spalding D B 1974 Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 3 269-289

[10] Singhal A K Athavale M M Li H Y and Jiang Y 2002 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 124(3)

617-624

[11] Meincke O and Rahmfeld R 2008 6th Int Fluid Power Conf (Dresden 1-2 April 2008) 485-99

[12] Heisler A Moskwa J and Fronczak F 2009 The Design of Low-Inertia High-Speed External

Gear PumpMotors for Hydrostatic Dynamometer Systems SAE Technical Paper 2009-01-

1117

[13] Wang D Ding H Jiang Y and Xiang X 2012 Numerical Modeling of Vane Oil Pump with

Variable Displacement SAE Technical Paper 2012-01-0637

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

12

Page 6: A CFD model for orbital gerotor motor - IOPscience

From equation (6) and (7) it is clear that at the point (0 ) both velocity components equal

zero Therefore that point corresponds to the coordinates of the instant center of rotation Since the

line of symmetry rotates around the outer gear center at the speed of c it is very straight forward to

calculate ICOR during the simulation

23 Mesh Solution

Similarly the motion of the inner gear boundary can be determined through the composite motion of

the rotation around the inner gear center plus the translation of the inner gear center The shape of the

fluid volume for the rotor is then properly defined

Meshing of movingdeforming fluid domains in a positive displacement (PD) fluid machine is

always very challenging As a typical PD machine gerotor motor has many dynamic fluid gaps with

very small clearances down to several microns Those gaps have a strong influence on machinersquos

performance including flow leakage and volumetric efficiency flow and pressure ripple pressure lock

cavitation and erosion and torque and power Therefore they have to be modeled accurately Many

generic moving mesh solutions for example the immersed boundary method have difficulties in

modeling such dynamic gaps So far the most successful solution for creating a gerotor rotor mesh is

the structured movingsliding mesh approach commonly used in normal gerotor pump simulations

(Jiang and Perng [2]) This approach is also adapted in this study

In the structured movingsliding mesh approach the fluid volume of the rotor chamber is separated

from the other parts of the fluid domain Topologically the rotor volume is similar to a ring and an

initial structured mesh can be easily created for that kind of shape The rotor mesh will be connected

to other fluid volumes through sliding interfaces When the inner gear surface moves to a new position

the mesh on the surface of the inner gear does not simply move with the inner gear surface Instead

the mesh ldquoslidesrdquo on the inner gear surface while make the necessary adjustments to conform to the

new clearance between the inner gear surface and the outer gear surface Simultaneously the interface

connections between the rotor volume and other fluid volumes are updated Figure 3 shows a typical

structured mesh for a gerotor rotor volume

Figure 4 Gerotor rotor structured mesh

24 Implementation

The proposed orbital gerotor model was implemented in the commercial CFD package PumpLinxreg

as

a new template A template in PumpLinx provides two main functionalities 1) It creates the initial

rotor mesh and controls mesh moving deformation of the rotor and other dynamic fluid volumes

during the simulation and 2) It provides special setup and post processing options for that specific

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

5

fluid machine With the help of the template user can setup a complete orbital gerotor motor in less

than 30 minutes starting from proper CAD geometry output One can refer to Ding et al [8] for a more

detailed description of the software

3 CFD Solver and Governing Equations

The CFD package used in this study solves conservation equations of mass and momentum using a

finite volume approach Those conservation laws can be written in integral representation as

(8)

(9)

The standard k two-equation model (Launder amp Spalding [9]) is used to account for turbulence

(10)

(11)

The cavitation model included in the software describes the cavitation vapor distribution using the

following formulation (Singhal et al [10])

(12)

where is the diffusivity of the vapor mass fraction and f is the turbulent Schmidt number The effects

of liquid vapor non-condensable gas (typically air) and liquid compressibility are all accounted for in

the model The final density calculation for the mixture is done by

(13)

This software package has been successfully used in CFD simulations for many different types of

positive displacement machines including swash plate piston pump [11] gerotor pump [8] external

gear pump [12] crescent pump [7] and variable displacement vane pump [13]

4 Gerotor Motor Test Case

An industrial orbital gerotor motor was used to demonstrate the proposed CFD model Figure 5 is the

solid model of the motor This motor has two ports port A and port B The inner gear and flow

distributor can also rotate in both directions without mechanical adjustment The flow and rotation

directions are determined by which port is connected to the high pressure fluid and which port is

connected to the low pressure fluid The one connected to the high pressure fluid becomes the inlet

and the rotation direction will also change accordingly

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

6

Figure 5 Solid model of an orbital gerotor motor

The fluid domain was subtracted from CAD geometry and divided into several volumes and

meshed separately (Figure 6) Except for the rotor part which was created with structured mesh all

other fluid volumes were meshed with unstructured binary tree mesh The special movingsliding

mesh of rotor volume and the rotation of flow distributor volume were automatically processed by the

template and the rest of the fluid volumes stayed stationary during the simulation Those independent

volumes were connected through sliding interfaces during simulation A total of 360000 cells was

used in this model

Figure 6 Fluid volumes with mesh

The working fluid used in the model is the high performance anti-wear hydraulic fluid HM46 The

properties of HM46 are listed in Table 1 Determined based on the information provided by motor

manufacturer operating conditions used in simulation are also listed in table 1

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

7

Table 1 Fluid properties and operating conditions

Density (kgm3) 879

Viscosity (PaS) 004

Rotation speed (RPM) 100

Inlet pressure (MPa) 1

Outlet pressure (MPa) 16

5 Simulation Results and Discussion

Figure 7 shows the pressure distribution of high pressure inlet low pressure outlet and the flow

distributor The magenta color indicates high pressure and the blue color indicates low pressure with

an overall pressure range from 0 to 18 MPa

Figure 7 Pressure distribution on inletoutlet ports and flow distributor

The flow distributor for this motor has a total of 16 shoe shaped connectors to be connected to the

rotor fluid pockets Eight of the connectors connect to the low pressure outlet and the other eight

connect to the high pressure inlet The connectors are arranged alternately and rotate at the same speed

as the inner gear to create the proper timing of the connections

Figure 8 shows the simulation results at 4 different moments In the picture surfaces are colored by

pressure with red representing high pressure and blue representing low pressure with an overall range

from 0 to 20 MPa Small spheres in those pictures are massless particles used to visualize the flow

field The white lines extruding from the particles show the direction and magnitude of the velocity of

each particle One can see that the red particles coming from the high pressure inlet are drawn into

the rotor And the blue particles after the pockets connect to the low pressure port are driven away

from the rotor towards the outlet

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

8

Figure 8 Pressure distribution and particle tracing

Figures 9 to 12 plot the time history of the pressure in one of the fluid pocket the mass flow rate

the power applied to the inner gear and the torque applied to the inner gear These curves correspond

to a 100 RPM rotation speed for one complete revolution of the inner gear The horizontal axis for

these plots is the rotation angle of the inner gear

Figure 9 Pressure in a fluid pocket

Figure 10 Mass flow rate

The plots show that the solution has a clear periodical pattern except in the first couple of time

steps The pattern repeats itself every time the inner gear advances one tooth This means that under

the current simulation conditions one only needs to solve 2 to 3 inner gear teeth rotation or 90 to 135

degree of the inner gear rotation to have a complete set of flow characteristics of the motor The

transient simulation time to model one gear tooth rotation for these simulation conditions is about 35

minutes on a quad-core single CPU 22GHZ I7 2720QM Laptop Computer

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

9

Figure 11 Hydraulic power

Figure 12 Torque

Experimental test samples provided by the manufacturer have rotational speeds ranging from 103

to 117RPM and pressure differences ranging from 15 to 17 MPa For this type of motor the flow rate

is a linear function of the rotation speed and the torque is a linear function of the pressure difference

In order to have a fair comparison the test flow rates are linearly converted to 100 RPM and the test

torques are linearly converted to15 MPa pressure difference The converted volume flow rate and

output torque of 41 test samples are plotted in figure 13 and 14 against the CFD simulation results

The horizontal axis of the two plots is test sample number The plots show that the CFD flow rate

prediction matches very well with the test data The predicted torque is about 12 higher than the test

results Since torque measured in the experiment is the final output torque from the motor it has

mechanical and friction loses that are not accounted for in CFD results This could be the main reason

for the discrepancy in CFD torque prediction

Figure 13 Comparison of predicted and test flow

rate

Figure 14 Comparison of predicted and test

torque

Figures 15 and 16 plot the flow rate and power vs rotation speed respectively As expected both

the flow rate and the power are linearly increasing with the rotation speed

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

10

Figure 15 Flow rate vs rotation speed Figure 16 Power vs rotation speed

Figure 17 plots the torque vs the rotational speed From this plot one can see that the torque of

orbital gerotor motor is not a strong function of rotational speed However the torque does decrease

slightly when the rotational speed increases

Figure 17 Torque vs rotation speed

6 Conclusions

By analyzing the working mechanism of orbital gerotor motors a CFD model for such fluid machine

was developed and implemented as a new template in the CFD software PumpLinx Simulation for a

production motor shows that the present computational model is accurate and efficient Itrsquos also found

that the flow solver used in the current study is very robust in handling very high mesh aspect ratios

and very small dynamic leakage gaps With the demonstrated speed robustness and accuracy this

model can be used as a high fidelity design tool in the design process or as a diagnosis tool for orbital

gerotor motors

Nomenclature

c

C1

C2

Cc

Ce

C

Df

Ec

f

fv

Inner gear center

Turbulence model constant

Turbulence model constant

Cavitation model constant

Cavitation model constant

Turbulence model constant

Diffusivity of vapor mass fraction

Inner gear eccentricity

Body force (N)

Vapor mass fraction

t

Sij

U

u

u

v

v vx vy x y

Time

Strain tensor

Initial velocity

Velocity component (ms)

Component of v

Velocity vector

Turbulent fluctuation velocity

Velocity in x y direction

Coordinates

Turbulence dissipation

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

11

fg

Gt

ICOR

in

k

L

M

NT

n p

Q

Rc

Re

RPM

Non-condensable gas mass fraction

Turbulent generation term

Instant center of rotation

Inner gear

Turbulence kinetic energy

Length

Mass flow rate (Kgs)

Number of gear teeth

Surface normal

Pressure (Pa)

Flow rate (m3h)

Vapor condensation rate

Vapor generation rate

Revolution per minute

t g l v k l f

Fluid viscosity (Pa-s)

Turbulent viscosity (Pa-s)

Fluid density (kgm3)

Gas density (kgm3)

Liquid density (kgm3)

Vapor density (kgm3)

Surface of control volume

Turbulence model constant

Surface tension

Turbulence model constant

Turbulent Schmidt numberStress tensor

Control volume

Rotation speed

References

[1] Ivantysyn J and Ivantysnova M 2003 Hydrostatic Pumps and Motors (New Delhi

Tech Books International)

[2] Jiang Y and Perng C 1997 An Efficient 3D Transient Computational Model for Vane Oil Pump

and Gerotor Oil Pump Simulations SAE Technical Paper 970841

[3] Kini S Mapara N Thoms R and Chang P 2005 Numerical Simulation of Cover Plate Deflection

in the Gerotor Pump SAE Technical Paper 2005-01-1917

[4] Zhang D Perng C and Laverty M 2006 Gerotor Oil Pump Performance and FlowPressure

Ripple Study SAE Technical Paper 2006-01-0359

[5] Natchimuthu K Sureshkumar J and Ganesan V 2010 CFD Analysis of Flow through a Gerotor

Oil Pump SAE Technical Paper 2010-01-1111

[6] Ruvalcaba M A and Hu X Gerotor Fuel Pump Performance and Leakage Study ASME 2011 Int

Mechanical Engineering Congress amp Exposition (Denver Colorado USA 2011)

[7] Jiang Y Furmanczyk M Lowry S and Zhang D et al 2008 A Three-Dimensional Design Tool

for Crescent Oil Pumps SAE Technical Paper 2008-01-0003

[8] Ding H Visser F C Jiang Y and Furmanczyk M 2011 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 133(1)

011101

[9] Launder B E and Spalding D B 1974 Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 3 269-289

[10] Singhal A K Athavale M M Li H Y and Jiang Y 2002 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 124(3)

617-624

[11] Meincke O and Rahmfeld R 2008 6th Int Fluid Power Conf (Dresden 1-2 April 2008) 485-99

[12] Heisler A Moskwa J and Fronczak F 2009 The Design of Low-Inertia High-Speed External

Gear PumpMotors for Hydrostatic Dynamometer Systems SAE Technical Paper 2009-01-

1117

[13] Wang D Ding H Jiang Y and Xiang X 2012 Numerical Modeling of Vane Oil Pump with

Variable Displacement SAE Technical Paper 2012-01-0637

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

12

Page 7: A CFD model for orbital gerotor motor - IOPscience

fluid machine With the help of the template user can setup a complete orbital gerotor motor in less

than 30 minutes starting from proper CAD geometry output One can refer to Ding et al [8] for a more

detailed description of the software

3 CFD Solver and Governing Equations

The CFD package used in this study solves conservation equations of mass and momentum using a

finite volume approach Those conservation laws can be written in integral representation as

(8)

(9)

The standard k two-equation model (Launder amp Spalding [9]) is used to account for turbulence

(10)

(11)

The cavitation model included in the software describes the cavitation vapor distribution using the

following formulation (Singhal et al [10])

(12)

where is the diffusivity of the vapor mass fraction and f is the turbulent Schmidt number The effects

of liquid vapor non-condensable gas (typically air) and liquid compressibility are all accounted for in

the model The final density calculation for the mixture is done by

(13)

This software package has been successfully used in CFD simulations for many different types of

positive displacement machines including swash plate piston pump [11] gerotor pump [8] external

gear pump [12] crescent pump [7] and variable displacement vane pump [13]

4 Gerotor Motor Test Case

An industrial orbital gerotor motor was used to demonstrate the proposed CFD model Figure 5 is the

solid model of the motor This motor has two ports port A and port B The inner gear and flow

distributor can also rotate in both directions without mechanical adjustment The flow and rotation

directions are determined by which port is connected to the high pressure fluid and which port is

connected to the low pressure fluid The one connected to the high pressure fluid becomes the inlet

and the rotation direction will also change accordingly

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

6

Figure 5 Solid model of an orbital gerotor motor

The fluid domain was subtracted from CAD geometry and divided into several volumes and

meshed separately (Figure 6) Except for the rotor part which was created with structured mesh all

other fluid volumes were meshed with unstructured binary tree mesh The special movingsliding

mesh of rotor volume and the rotation of flow distributor volume were automatically processed by the

template and the rest of the fluid volumes stayed stationary during the simulation Those independent

volumes were connected through sliding interfaces during simulation A total of 360000 cells was

used in this model

Figure 6 Fluid volumes with mesh

The working fluid used in the model is the high performance anti-wear hydraulic fluid HM46 The

properties of HM46 are listed in Table 1 Determined based on the information provided by motor

manufacturer operating conditions used in simulation are also listed in table 1

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

7

Table 1 Fluid properties and operating conditions

Density (kgm3) 879

Viscosity (PaS) 004

Rotation speed (RPM) 100

Inlet pressure (MPa) 1

Outlet pressure (MPa) 16

5 Simulation Results and Discussion

Figure 7 shows the pressure distribution of high pressure inlet low pressure outlet and the flow

distributor The magenta color indicates high pressure and the blue color indicates low pressure with

an overall pressure range from 0 to 18 MPa

Figure 7 Pressure distribution on inletoutlet ports and flow distributor

The flow distributor for this motor has a total of 16 shoe shaped connectors to be connected to the

rotor fluid pockets Eight of the connectors connect to the low pressure outlet and the other eight

connect to the high pressure inlet The connectors are arranged alternately and rotate at the same speed

as the inner gear to create the proper timing of the connections

Figure 8 shows the simulation results at 4 different moments In the picture surfaces are colored by

pressure with red representing high pressure and blue representing low pressure with an overall range

from 0 to 20 MPa Small spheres in those pictures are massless particles used to visualize the flow

field The white lines extruding from the particles show the direction and magnitude of the velocity of

each particle One can see that the red particles coming from the high pressure inlet are drawn into

the rotor And the blue particles after the pockets connect to the low pressure port are driven away

from the rotor towards the outlet

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

8

Figure 8 Pressure distribution and particle tracing

Figures 9 to 12 plot the time history of the pressure in one of the fluid pocket the mass flow rate

the power applied to the inner gear and the torque applied to the inner gear These curves correspond

to a 100 RPM rotation speed for one complete revolution of the inner gear The horizontal axis for

these plots is the rotation angle of the inner gear

Figure 9 Pressure in a fluid pocket

Figure 10 Mass flow rate

The plots show that the solution has a clear periodical pattern except in the first couple of time

steps The pattern repeats itself every time the inner gear advances one tooth This means that under

the current simulation conditions one only needs to solve 2 to 3 inner gear teeth rotation or 90 to 135

degree of the inner gear rotation to have a complete set of flow characteristics of the motor The

transient simulation time to model one gear tooth rotation for these simulation conditions is about 35

minutes on a quad-core single CPU 22GHZ I7 2720QM Laptop Computer

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

9

Figure 11 Hydraulic power

Figure 12 Torque

Experimental test samples provided by the manufacturer have rotational speeds ranging from 103

to 117RPM and pressure differences ranging from 15 to 17 MPa For this type of motor the flow rate

is a linear function of the rotation speed and the torque is a linear function of the pressure difference

In order to have a fair comparison the test flow rates are linearly converted to 100 RPM and the test

torques are linearly converted to15 MPa pressure difference The converted volume flow rate and

output torque of 41 test samples are plotted in figure 13 and 14 against the CFD simulation results

The horizontal axis of the two plots is test sample number The plots show that the CFD flow rate

prediction matches very well with the test data The predicted torque is about 12 higher than the test

results Since torque measured in the experiment is the final output torque from the motor it has

mechanical and friction loses that are not accounted for in CFD results This could be the main reason

for the discrepancy in CFD torque prediction

Figure 13 Comparison of predicted and test flow

rate

Figure 14 Comparison of predicted and test

torque

Figures 15 and 16 plot the flow rate and power vs rotation speed respectively As expected both

the flow rate and the power are linearly increasing with the rotation speed

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

10

Figure 15 Flow rate vs rotation speed Figure 16 Power vs rotation speed

Figure 17 plots the torque vs the rotational speed From this plot one can see that the torque of

orbital gerotor motor is not a strong function of rotational speed However the torque does decrease

slightly when the rotational speed increases

Figure 17 Torque vs rotation speed

6 Conclusions

By analyzing the working mechanism of orbital gerotor motors a CFD model for such fluid machine

was developed and implemented as a new template in the CFD software PumpLinx Simulation for a

production motor shows that the present computational model is accurate and efficient Itrsquos also found

that the flow solver used in the current study is very robust in handling very high mesh aspect ratios

and very small dynamic leakage gaps With the demonstrated speed robustness and accuracy this

model can be used as a high fidelity design tool in the design process or as a diagnosis tool for orbital

gerotor motors

Nomenclature

c

C1

C2

Cc

Ce

C

Df

Ec

f

fv

Inner gear center

Turbulence model constant

Turbulence model constant

Cavitation model constant

Cavitation model constant

Turbulence model constant

Diffusivity of vapor mass fraction

Inner gear eccentricity

Body force (N)

Vapor mass fraction

t

Sij

U

u

u

v

v vx vy x y

Time

Strain tensor

Initial velocity

Velocity component (ms)

Component of v

Velocity vector

Turbulent fluctuation velocity

Velocity in x y direction

Coordinates

Turbulence dissipation

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

11

fg

Gt

ICOR

in

k

L

M

NT

n p

Q

Rc

Re

RPM

Non-condensable gas mass fraction

Turbulent generation term

Instant center of rotation

Inner gear

Turbulence kinetic energy

Length

Mass flow rate (Kgs)

Number of gear teeth

Surface normal

Pressure (Pa)

Flow rate (m3h)

Vapor condensation rate

Vapor generation rate

Revolution per minute

t g l v k l f

Fluid viscosity (Pa-s)

Turbulent viscosity (Pa-s)

Fluid density (kgm3)

Gas density (kgm3)

Liquid density (kgm3)

Vapor density (kgm3)

Surface of control volume

Turbulence model constant

Surface tension

Turbulence model constant

Turbulent Schmidt numberStress tensor

Control volume

Rotation speed

References

[1] Ivantysyn J and Ivantysnova M 2003 Hydrostatic Pumps and Motors (New Delhi

Tech Books International)

[2] Jiang Y and Perng C 1997 An Efficient 3D Transient Computational Model for Vane Oil Pump

and Gerotor Oil Pump Simulations SAE Technical Paper 970841

[3] Kini S Mapara N Thoms R and Chang P 2005 Numerical Simulation of Cover Plate Deflection

in the Gerotor Pump SAE Technical Paper 2005-01-1917

[4] Zhang D Perng C and Laverty M 2006 Gerotor Oil Pump Performance and FlowPressure

Ripple Study SAE Technical Paper 2006-01-0359

[5] Natchimuthu K Sureshkumar J and Ganesan V 2010 CFD Analysis of Flow through a Gerotor

Oil Pump SAE Technical Paper 2010-01-1111

[6] Ruvalcaba M A and Hu X Gerotor Fuel Pump Performance and Leakage Study ASME 2011 Int

Mechanical Engineering Congress amp Exposition (Denver Colorado USA 2011)

[7] Jiang Y Furmanczyk M Lowry S and Zhang D et al 2008 A Three-Dimensional Design Tool

for Crescent Oil Pumps SAE Technical Paper 2008-01-0003

[8] Ding H Visser F C Jiang Y and Furmanczyk M 2011 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 133(1)

011101

[9] Launder B E and Spalding D B 1974 Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 3 269-289

[10] Singhal A K Athavale M M Li H Y and Jiang Y 2002 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 124(3)

617-624

[11] Meincke O and Rahmfeld R 2008 6th Int Fluid Power Conf (Dresden 1-2 April 2008) 485-99

[12] Heisler A Moskwa J and Fronczak F 2009 The Design of Low-Inertia High-Speed External

Gear PumpMotors for Hydrostatic Dynamometer Systems SAE Technical Paper 2009-01-

1117

[13] Wang D Ding H Jiang Y and Xiang X 2012 Numerical Modeling of Vane Oil Pump with

Variable Displacement SAE Technical Paper 2012-01-0637

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

12

Page 8: A CFD model for orbital gerotor motor - IOPscience

Figure 5 Solid model of an orbital gerotor motor

The fluid domain was subtracted from CAD geometry and divided into several volumes and

meshed separately (Figure 6) Except for the rotor part which was created with structured mesh all

other fluid volumes were meshed with unstructured binary tree mesh The special movingsliding

mesh of rotor volume and the rotation of flow distributor volume were automatically processed by the

template and the rest of the fluid volumes stayed stationary during the simulation Those independent

volumes were connected through sliding interfaces during simulation A total of 360000 cells was

used in this model

Figure 6 Fluid volumes with mesh

The working fluid used in the model is the high performance anti-wear hydraulic fluid HM46 The

properties of HM46 are listed in Table 1 Determined based on the information provided by motor

manufacturer operating conditions used in simulation are also listed in table 1

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

7

Table 1 Fluid properties and operating conditions

Density (kgm3) 879

Viscosity (PaS) 004

Rotation speed (RPM) 100

Inlet pressure (MPa) 1

Outlet pressure (MPa) 16

5 Simulation Results and Discussion

Figure 7 shows the pressure distribution of high pressure inlet low pressure outlet and the flow

distributor The magenta color indicates high pressure and the blue color indicates low pressure with

an overall pressure range from 0 to 18 MPa

Figure 7 Pressure distribution on inletoutlet ports and flow distributor

The flow distributor for this motor has a total of 16 shoe shaped connectors to be connected to the

rotor fluid pockets Eight of the connectors connect to the low pressure outlet and the other eight

connect to the high pressure inlet The connectors are arranged alternately and rotate at the same speed

as the inner gear to create the proper timing of the connections

Figure 8 shows the simulation results at 4 different moments In the picture surfaces are colored by

pressure with red representing high pressure and blue representing low pressure with an overall range

from 0 to 20 MPa Small spheres in those pictures are massless particles used to visualize the flow

field The white lines extruding from the particles show the direction and magnitude of the velocity of

each particle One can see that the red particles coming from the high pressure inlet are drawn into

the rotor And the blue particles after the pockets connect to the low pressure port are driven away

from the rotor towards the outlet

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

8

Figure 8 Pressure distribution and particle tracing

Figures 9 to 12 plot the time history of the pressure in one of the fluid pocket the mass flow rate

the power applied to the inner gear and the torque applied to the inner gear These curves correspond

to a 100 RPM rotation speed for one complete revolution of the inner gear The horizontal axis for

these plots is the rotation angle of the inner gear

Figure 9 Pressure in a fluid pocket

Figure 10 Mass flow rate

The plots show that the solution has a clear periodical pattern except in the first couple of time

steps The pattern repeats itself every time the inner gear advances one tooth This means that under

the current simulation conditions one only needs to solve 2 to 3 inner gear teeth rotation or 90 to 135

degree of the inner gear rotation to have a complete set of flow characteristics of the motor The

transient simulation time to model one gear tooth rotation for these simulation conditions is about 35

minutes on a quad-core single CPU 22GHZ I7 2720QM Laptop Computer

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

9

Figure 11 Hydraulic power

Figure 12 Torque

Experimental test samples provided by the manufacturer have rotational speeds ranging from 103

to 117RPM and pressure differences ranging from 15 to 17 MPa For this type of motor the flow rate

is a linear function of the rotation speed and the torque is a linear function of the pressure difference

In order to have a fair comparison the test flow rates are linearly converted to 100 RPM and the test

torques are linearly converted to15 MPa pressure difference The converted volume flow rate and

output torque of 41 test samples are plotted in figure 13 and 14 against the CFD simulation results

The horizontal axis of the two plots is test sample number The plots show that the CFD flow rate

prediction matches very well with the test data The predicted torque is about 12 higher than the test

results Since torque measured in the experiment is the final output torque from the motor it has

mechanical and friction loses that are not accounted for in CFD results This could be the main reason

for the discrepancy in CFD torque prediction

Figure 13 Comparison of predicted and test flow

rate

Figure 14 Comparison of predicted and test

torque

Figures 15 and 16 plot the flow rate and power vs rotation speed respectively As expected both

the flow rate and the power are linearly increasing with the rotation speed

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

10

Figure 15 Flow rate vs rotation speed Figure 16 Power vs rotation speed

Figure 17 plots the torque vs the rotational speed From this plot one can see that the torque of

orbital gerotor motor is not a strong function of rotational speed However the torque does decrease

slightly when the rotational speed increases

Figure 17 Torque vs rotation speed

6 Conclusions

By analyzing the working mechanism of orbital gerotor motors a CFD model for such fluid machine

was developed and implemented as a new template in the CFD software PumpLinx Simulation for a

production motor shows that the present computational model is accurate and efficient Itrsquos also found

that the flow solver used in the current study is very robust in handling very high mesh aspect ratios

and very small dynamic leakage gaps With the demonstrated speed robustness and accuracy this

model can be used as a high fidelity design tool in the design process or as a diagnosis tool for orbital

gerotor motors

Nomenclature

c

C1

C2

Cc

Ce

C

Df

Ec

f

fv

Inner gear center

Turbulence model constant

Turbulence model constant

Cavitation model constant

Cavitation model constant

Turbulence model constant

Diffusivity of vapor mass fraction

Inner gear eccentricity

Body force (N)

Vapor mass fraction

t

Sij

U

u

u

v

v vx vy x y

Time

Strain tensor

Initial velocity

Velocity component (ms)

Component of v

Velocity vector

Turbulent fluctuation velocity

Velocity in x y direction

Coordinates

Turbulence dissipation

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

11

fg

Gt

ICOR

in

k

L

M

NT

n p

Q

Rc

Re

RPM

Non-condensable gas mass fraction

Turbulent generation term

Instant center of rotation

Inner gear

Turbulence kinetic energy

Length

Mass flow rate (Kgs)

Number of gear teeth

Surface normal

Pressure (Pa)

Flow rate (m3h)

Vapor condensation rate

Vapor generation rate

Revolution per minute

t g l v k l f

Fluid viscosity (Pa-s)

Turbulent viscosity (Pa-s)

Fluid density (kgm3)

Gas density (kgm3)

Liquid density (kgm3)

Vapor density (kgm3)

Surface of control volume

Turbulence model constant

Surface tension

Turbulence model constant

Turbulent Schmidt numberStress tensor

Control volume

Rotation speed

References

[1] Ivantysyn J and Ivantysnova M 2003 Hydrostatic Pumps and Motors (New Delhi

Tech Books International)

[2] Jiang Y and Perng C 1997 An Efficient 3D Transient Computational Model for Vane Oil Pump

and Gerotor Oil Pump Simulations SAE Technical Paper 970841

[3] Kini S Mapara N Thoms R and Chang P 2005 Numerical Simulation of Cover Plate Deflection

in the Gerotor Pump SAE Technical Paper 2005-01-1917

[4] Zhang D Perng C and Laverty M 2006 Gerotor Oil Pump Performance and FlowPressure

Ripple Study SAE Technical Paper 2006-01-0359

[5] Natchimuthu K Sureshkumar J and Ganesan V 2010 CFD Analysis of Flow through a Gerotor

Oil Pump SAE Technical Paper 2010-01-1111

[6] Ruvalcaba M A and Hu X Gerotor Fuel Pump Performance and Leakage Study ASME 2011 Int

Mechanical Engineering Congress amp Exposition (Denver Colorado USA 2011)

[7] Jiang Y Furmanczyk M Lowry S and Zhang D et al 2008 A Three-Dimensional Design Tool

for Crescent Oil Pumps SAE Technical Paper 2008-01-0003

[8] Ding H Visser F C Jiang Y and Furmanczyk M 2011 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 133(1)

011101

[9] Launder B E and Spalding D B 1974 Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 3 269-289

[10] Singhal A K Athavale M M Li H Y and Jiang Y 2002 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 124(3)

617-624

[11] Meincke O and Rahmfeld R 2008 6th Int Fluid Power Conf (Dresden 1-2 April 2008) 485-99

[12] Heisler A Moskwa J and Fronczak F 2009 The Design of Low-Inertia High-Speed External

Gear PumpMotors for Hydrostatic Dynamometer Systems SAE Technical Paper 2009-01-

1117

[13] Wang D Ding H Jiang Y and Xiang X 2012 Numerical Modeling of Vane Oil Pump with

Variable Displacement SAE Technical Paper 2012-01-0637

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

12

Page 9: A CFD model for orbital gerotor motor - IOPscience

Table 1 Fluid properties and operating conditions

Density (kgm3) 879

Viscosity (PaS) 004

Rotation speed (RPM) 100

Inlet pressure (MPa) 1

Outlet pressure (MPa) 16

5 Simulation Results and Discussion

Figure 7 shows the pressure distribution of high pressure inlet low pressure outlet and the flow

distributor The magenta color indicates high pressure and the blue color indicates low pressure with

an overall pressure range from 0 to 18 MPa

Figure 7 Pressure distribution on inletoutlet ports and flow distributor

The flow distributor for this motor has a total of 16 shoe shaped connectors to be connected to the

rotor fluid pockets Eight of the connectors connect to the low pressure outlet and the other eight

connect to the high pressure inlet The connectors are arranged alternately and rotate at the same speed

as the inner gear to create the proper timing of the connections

Figure 8 shows the simulation results at 4 different moments In the picture surfaces are colored by

pressure with red representing high pressure and blue representing low pressure with an overall range

from 0 to 20 MPa Small spheres in those pictures are massless particles used to visualize the flow

field The white lines extruding from the particles show the direction and magnitude of the velocity of

each particle One can see that the red particles coming from the high pressure inlet are drawn into

the rotor And the blue particles after the pockets connect to the low pressure port are driven away

from the rotor towards the outlet

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

8

Figure 8 Pressure distribution and particle tracing

Figures 9 to 12 plot the time history of the pressure in one of the fluid pocket the mass flow rate

the power applied to the inner gear and the torque applied to the inner gear These curves correspond

to a 100 RPM rotation speed for one complete revolution of the inner gear The horizontal axis for

these plots is the rotation angle of the inner gear

Figure 9 Pressure in a fluid pocket

Figure 10 Mass flow rate

The plots show that the solution has a clear periodical pattern except in the first couple of time

steps The pattern repeats itself every time the inner gear advances one tooth This means that under

the current simulation conditions one only needs to solve 2 to 3 inner gear teeth rotation or 90 to 135

degree of the inner gear rotation to have a complete set of flow characteristics of the motor The

transient simulation time to model one gear tooth rotation for these simulation conditions is about 35

minutes on a quad-core single CPU 22GHZ I7 2720QM Laptop Computer

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

9

Figure 11 Hydraulic power

Figure 12 Torque

Experimental test samples provided by the manufacturer have rotational speeds ranging from 103

to 117RPM and pressure differences ranging from 15 to 17 MPa For this type of motor the flow rate

is a linear function of the rotation speed and the torque is a linear function of the pressure difference

In order to have a fair comparison the test flow rates are linearly converted to 100 RPM and the test

torques are linearly converted to15 MPa pressure difference The converted volume flow rate and

output torque of 41 test samples are plotted in figure 13 and 14 against the CFD simulation results

The horizontal axis of the two plots is test sample number The plots show that the CFD flow rate

prediction matches very well with the test data The predicted torque is about 12 higher than the test

results Since torque measured in the experiment is the final output torque from the motor it has

mechanical and friction loses that are not accounted for in CFD results This could be the main reason

for the discrepancy in CFD torque prediction

Figure 13 Comparison of predicted and test flow

rate

Figure 14 Comparison of predicted and test

torque

Figures 15 and 16 plot the flow rate and power vs rotation speed respectively As expected both

the flow rate and the power are linearly increasing with the rotation speed

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

10

Figure 15 Flow rate vs rotation speed Figure 16 Power vs rotation speed

Figure 17 plots the torque vs the rotational speed From this plot one can see that the torque of

orbital gerotor motor is not a strong function of rotational speed However the torque does decrease

slightly when the rotational speed increases

Figure 17 Torque vs rotation speed

6 Conclusions

By analyzing the working mechanism of orbital gerotor motors a CFD model for such fluid machine

was developed and implemented as a new template in the CFD software PumpLinx Simulation for a

production motor shows that the present computational model is accurate and efficient Itrsquos also found

that the flow solver used in the current study is very robust in handling very high mesh aspect ratios

and very small dynamic leakage gaps With the demonstrated speed robustness and accuracy this

model can be used as a high fidelity design tool in the design process or as a diagnosis tool for orbital

gerotor motors

Nomenclature

c

C1

C2

Cc

Ce

C

Df

Ec

f

fv

Inner gear center

Turbulence model constant

Turbulence model constant

Cavitation model constant

Cavitation model constant

Turbulence model constant

Diffusivity of vapor mass fraction

Inner gear eccentricity

Body force (N)

Vapor mass fraction

t

Sij

U

u

u

v

v vx vy x y

Time

Strain tensor

Initial velocity

Velocity component (ms)

Component of v

Velocity vector

Turbulent fluctuation velocity

Velocity in x y direction

Coordinates

Turbulence dissipation

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

11

fg

Gt

ICOR

in

k

L

M

NT

n p

Q

Rc

Re

RPM

Non-condensable gas mass fraction

Turbulent generation term

Instant center of rotation

Inner gear

Turbulence kinetic energy

Length

Mass flow rate (Kgs)

Number of gear teeth

Surface normal

Pressure (Pa)

Flow rate (m3h)

Vapor condensation rate

Vapor generation rate

Revolution per minute

t g l v k l f

Fluid viscosity (Pa-s)

Turbulent viscosity (Pa-s)

Fluid density (kgm3)

Gas density (kgm3)

Liquid density (kgm3)

Vapor density (kgm3)

Surface of control volume

Turbulence model constant

Surface tension

Turbulence model constant

Turbulent Schmidt numberStress tensor

Control volume

Rotation speed

References

[1] Ivantysyn J and Ivantysnova M 2003 Hydrostatic Pumps and Motors (New Delhi

Tech Books International)

[2] Jiang Y and Perng C 1997 An Efficient 3D Transient Computational Model for Vane Oil Pump

and Gerotor Oil Pump Simulations SAE Technical Paper 970841

[3] Kini S Mapara N Thoms R and Chang P 2005 Numerical Simulation of Cover Plate Deflection

in the Gerotor Pump SAE Technical Paper 2005-01-1917

[4] Zhang D Perng C and Laverty M 2006 Gerotor Oil Pump Performance and FlowPressure

Ripple Study SAE Technical Paper 2006-01-0359

[5] Natchimuthu K Sureshkumar J and Ganesan V 2010 CFD Analysis of Flow through a Gerotor

Oil Pump SAE Technical Paper 2010-01-1111

[6] Ruvalcaba M A and Hu X Gerotor Fuel Pump Performance and Leakage Study ASME 2011 Int

Mechanical Engineering Congress amp Exposition (Denver Colorado USA 2011)

[7] Jiang Y Furmanczyk M Lowry S and Zhang D et al 2008 A Three-Dimensional Design Tool

for Crescent Oil Pumps SAE Technical Paper 2008-01-0003

[8] Ding H Visser F C Jiang Y and Furmanczyk M 2011 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 133(1)

011101

[9] Launder B E and Spalding D B 1974 Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 3 269-289

[10] Singhal A K Athavale M M Li H Y and Jiang Y 2002 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 124(3)

617-624

[11] Meincke O and Rahmfeld R 2008 6th Int Fluid Power Conf (Dresden 1-2 April 2008) 485-99

[12] Heisler A Moskwa J and Fronczak F 2009 The Design of Low-Inertia High-Speed External

Gear PumpMotors for Hydrostatic Dynamometer Systems SAE Technical Paper 2009-01-

1117

[13] Wang D Ding H Jiang Y and Xiang X 2012 Numerical Modeling of Vane Oil Pump with

Variable Displacement SAE Technical Paper 2012-01-0637

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

12

Page 10: A CFD model for orbital gerotor motor - IOPscience

Figure 8 Pressure distribution and particle tracing

Figures 9 to 12 plot the time history of the pressure in one of the fluid pocket the mass flow rate

the power applied to the inner gear and the torque applied to the inner gear These curves correspond

to a 100 RPM rotation speed for one complete revolution of the inner gear The horizontal axis for

these plots is the rotation angle of the inner gear

Figure 9 Pressure in a fluid pocket

Figure 10 Mass flow rate

The plots show that the solution has a clear periodical pattern except in the first couple of time

steps The pattern repeats itself every time the inner gear advances one tooth This means that under

the current simulation conditions one only needs to solve 2 to 3 inner gear teeth rotation or 90 to 135

degree of the inner gear rotation to have a complete set of flow characteristics of the motor The

transient simulation time to model one gear tooth rotation for these simulation conditions is about 35

minutes on a quad-core single CPU 22GHZ I7 2720QM Laptop Computer

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

9

Figure 11 Hydraulic power

Figure 12 Torque

Experimental test samples provided by the manufacturer have rotational speeds ranging from 103

to 117RPM and pressure differences ranging from 15 to 17 MPa For this type of motor the flow rate

is a linear function of the rotation speed and the torque is a linear function of the pressure difference

In order to have a fair comparison the test flow rates are linearly converted to 100 RPM and the test

torques are linearly converted to15 MPa pressure difference The converted volume flow rate and

output torque of 41 test samples are plotted in figure 13 and 14 against the CFD simulation results

The horizontal axis of the two plots is test sample number The plots show that the CFD flow rate

prediction matches very well with the test data The predicted torque is about 12 higher than the test

results Since torque measured in the experiment is the final output torque from the motor it has

mechanical and friction loses that are not accounted for in CFD results This could be the main reason

for the discrepancy in CFD torque prediction

Figure 13 Comparison of predicted and test flow

rate

Figure 14 Comparison of predicted and test

torque

Figures 15 and 16 plot the flow rate and power vs rotation speed respectively As expected both

the flow rate and the power are linearly increasing with the rotation speed

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

10

Figure 15 Flow rate vs rotation speed Figure 16 Power vs rotation speed

Figure 17 plots the torque vs the rotational speed From this plot one can see that the torque of

orbital gerotor motor is not a strong function of rotational speed However the torque does decrease

slightly when the rotational speed increases

Figure 17 Torque vs rotation speed

6 Conclusions

By analyzing the working mechanism of orbital gerotor motors a CFD model for such fluid machine

was developed and implemented as a new template in the CFD software PumpLinx Simulation for a

production motor shows that the present computational model is accurate and efficient Itrsquos also found

that the flow solver used in the current study is very robust in handling very high mesh aspect ratios

and very small dynamic leakage gaps With the demonstrated speed robustness and accuracy this

model can be used as a high fidelity design tool in the design process or as a diagnosis tool for orbital

gerotor motors

Nomenclature

c

C1

C2

Cc

Ce

C

Df

Ec

f

fv

Inner gear center

Turbulence model constant

Turbulence model constant

Cavitation model constant

Cavitation model constant

Turbulence model constant

Diffusivity of vapor mass fraction

Inner gear eccentricity

Body force (N)

Vapor mass fraction

t

Sij

U

u

u

v

v vx vy x y

Time

Strain tensor

Initial velocity

Velocity component (ms)

Component of v

Velocity vector

Turbulent fluctuation velocity

Velocity in x y direction

Coordinates

Turbulence dissipation

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

11

fg

Gt

ICOR

in

k

L

M

NT

n p

Q

Rc

Re

RPM

Non-condensable gas mass fraction

Turbulent generation term

Instant center of rotation

Inner gear

Turbulence kinetic energy

Length

Mass flow rate (Kgs)

Number of gear teeth

Surface normal

Pressure (Pa)

Flow rate (m3h)

Vapor condensation rate

Vapor generation rate

Revolution per minute

t g l v k l f

Fluid viscosity (Pa-s)

Turbulent viscosity (Pa-s)

Fluid density (kgm3)

Gas density (kgm3)

Liquid density (kgm3)

Vapor density (kgm3)

Surface of control volume

Turbulence model constant

Surface tension

Turbulence model constant

Turbulent Schmidt numberStress tensor

Control volume

Rotation speed

References

[1] Ivantysyn J and Ivantysnova M 2003 Hydrostatic Pumps and Motors (New Delhi

Tech Books International)

[2] Jiang Y and Perng C 1997 An Efficient 3D Transient Computational Model for Vane Oil Pump

and Gerotor Oil Pump Simulations SAE Technical Paper 970841

[3] Kini S Mapara N Thoms R and Chang P 2005 Numerical Simulation of Cover Plate Deflection

in the Gerotor Pump SAE Technical Paper 2005-01-1917

[4] Zhang D Perng C and Laverty M 2006 Gerotor Oil Pump Performance and FlowPressure

Ripple Study SAE Technical Paper 2006-01-0359

[5] Natchimuthu K Sureshkumar J and Ganesan V 2010 CFD Analysis of Flow through a Gerotor

Oil Pump SAE Technical Paper 2010-01-1111

[6] Ruvalcaba M A and Hu X Gerotor Fuel Pump Performance and Leakage Study ASME 2011 Int

Mechanical Engineering Congress amp Exposition (Denver Colorado USA 2011)

[7] Jiang Y Furmanczyk M Lowry S and Zhang D et al 2008 A Three-Dimensional Design Tool

for Crescent Oil Pumps SAE Technical Paper 2008-01-0003

[8] Ding H Visser F C Jiang Y and Furmanczyk M 2011 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 133(1)

011101

[9] Launder B E and Spalding D B 1974 Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 3 269-289

[10] Singhal A K Athavale M M Li H Y and Jiang Y 2002 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 124(3)

617-624

[11] Meincke O and Rahmfeld R 2008 6th Int Fluid Power Conf (Dresden 1-2 April 2008) 485-99

[12] Heisler A Moskwa J and Fronczak F 2009 The Design of Low-Inertia High-Speed External

Gear PumpMotors for Hydrostatic Dynamometer Systems SAE Technical Paper 2009-01-

1117

[13] Wang D Ding H Jiang Y and Xiang X 2012 Numerical Modeling of Vane Oil Pump with

Variable Displacement SAE Technical Paper 2012-01-0637

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

12

Page 11: A CFD model for orbital gerotor motor - IOPscience

Figure 11 Hydraulic power

Figure 12 Torque

Experimental test samples provided by the manufacturer have rotational speeds ranging from 103

to 117RPM and pressure differences ranging from 15 to 17 MPa For this type of motor the flow rate

is a linear function of the rotation speed and the torque is a linear function of the pressure difference

In order to have a fair comparison the test flow rates are linearly converted to 100 RPM and the test

torques are linearly converted to15 MPa pressure difference The converted volume flow rate and

output torque of 41 test samples are plotted in figure 13 and 14 against the CFD simulation results

The horizontal axis of the two plots is test sample number The plots show that the CFD flow rate

prediction matches very well with the test data The predicted torque is about 12 higher than the test

results Since torque measured in the experiment is the final output torque from the motor it has

mechanical and friction loses that are not accounted for in CFD results This could be the main reason

for the discrepancy in CFD torque prediction

Figure 13 Comparison of predicted and test flow

rate

Figure 14 Comparison of predicted and test

torque

Figures 15 and 16 plot the flow rate and power vs rotation speed respectively As expected both

the flow rate and the power are linearly increasing with the rotation speed

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

10

Figure 15 Flow rate vs rotation speed Figure 16 Power vs rotation speed

Figure 17 plots the torque vs the rotational speed From this plot one can see that the torque of

orbital gerotor motor is not a strong function of rotational speed However the torque does decrease

slightly when the rotational speed increases

Figure 17 Torque vs rotation speed

6 Conclusions

By analyzing the working mechanism of orbital gerotor motors a CFD model for such fluid machine

was developed and implemented as a new template in the CFD software PumpLinx Simulation for a

production motor shows that the present computational model is accurate and efficient Itrsquos also found

that the flow solver used in the current study is very robust in handling very high mesh aspect ratios

and very small dynamic leakage gaps With the demonstrated speed robustness and accuracy this

model can be used as a high fidelity design tool in the design process or as a diagnosis tool for orbital

gerotor motors

Nomenclature

c

C1

C2

Cc

Ce

C

Df

Ec

f

fv

Inner gear center

Turbulence model constant

Turbulence model constant

Cavitation model constant

Cavitation model constant

Turbulence model constant

Diffusivity of vapor mass fraction

Inner gear eccentricity

Body force (N)

Vapor mass fraction

t

Sij

U

u

u

v

v vx vy x y

Time

Strain tensor

Initial velocity

Velocity component (ms)

Component of v

Velocity vector

Turbulent fluctuation velocity

Velocity in x y direction

Coordinates

Turbulence dissipation

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

11

fg

Gt

ICOR

in

k

L

M

NT

n p

Q

Rc

Re

RPM

Non-condensable gas mass fraction

Turbulent generation term

Instant center of rotation

Inner gear

Turbulence kinetic energy

Length

Mass flow rate (Kgs)

Number of gear teeth

Surface normal

Pressure (Pa)

Flow rate (m3h)

Vapor condensation rate

Vapor generation rate

Revolution per minute

t g l v k l f

Fluid viscosity (Pa-s)

Turbulent viscosity (Pa-s)

Fluid density (kgm3)

Gas density (kgm3)

Liquid density (kgm3)

Vapor density (kgm3)

Surface of control volume

Turbulence model constant

Surface tension

Turbulence model constant

Turbulent Schmidt numberStress tensor

Control volume

Rotation speed

References

[1] Ivantysyn J and Ivantysnova M 2003 Hydrostatic Pumps and Motors (New Delhi

Tech Books International)

[2] Jiang Y and Perng C 1997 An Efficient 3D Transient Computational Model for Vane Oil Pump

and Gerotor Oil Pump Simulations SAE Technical Paper 970841

[3] Kini S Mapara N Thoms R and Chang P 2005 Numerical Simulation of Cover Plate Deflection

in the Gerotor Pump SAE Technical Paper 2005-01-1917

[4] Zhang D Perng C and Laverty M 2006 Gerotor Oil Pump Performance and FlowPressure

Ripple Study SAE Technical Paper 2006-01-0359

[5] Natchimuthu K Sureshkumar J and Ganesan V 2010 CFD Analysis of Flow through a Gerotor

Oil Pump SAE Technical Paper 2010-01-1111

[6] Ruvalcaba M A and Hu X Gerotor Fuel Pump Performance and Leakage Study ASME 2011 Int

Mechanical Engineering Congress amp Exposition (Denver Colorado USA 2011)

[7] Jiang Y Furmanczyk M Lowry S and Zhang D et al 2008 A Three-Dimensional Design Tool

for Crescent Oil Pumps SAE Technical Paper 2008-01-0003

[8] Ding H Visser F C Jiang Y and Furmanczyk M 2011 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 133(1)

011101

[9] Launder B E and Spalding D B 1974 Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 3 269-289

[10] Singhal A K Athavale M M Li H Y and Jiang Y 2002 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 124(3)

617-624

[11] Meincke O and Rahmfeld R 2008 6th Int Fluid Power Conf (Dresden 1-2 April 2008) 485-99

[12] Heisler A Moskwa J and Fronczak F 2009 The Design of Low-Inertia High-Speed External

Gear PumpMotors for Hydrostatic Dynamometer Systems SAE Technical Paper 2009-01-

1117

[13] Wang D Ding H Jiang Y and Xiang X 2012 Numerical Modeling of Vane Oil Pump with

Variable Displacement SAE Technical Paper 2012-01-0637

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

12

Page 12: A CFD model for orbital gerotor motor - IOPscience

Figure 15 Flow rate vs rotation speed Figure 16 Power vs rotation speed

Figure 17 plots the torque vs the rotational speed From this plot one can see that the torque of

orbital gerotor motor is not a strong function of rotational speed However the torque does decrease

slightly when the rotational speed increases

Figure 17 Torque vs rotation speed

6 Conclusions

By analyzing the working mechanism of orbital gerotor motors a CFD model for such fluid machine

was developed and implemented as a new template in the CFD software PumpLinx Simulation for a

production motor shows that the present computational model is accurate and efficient Itrsquos also found

that the flow solver used in the current study is very robust in handling very high mesh aspect ratios

and very small dynamic leakage gaps With the demonstrated speed robustness and accuracy this

model can be used as a high fidelity design tool in the design process or as a diagnosis tool for orbital

gerotor motors

Nomenclature

c

C1

C2

Cc

Ce

C

Df

Ec

f

fv

Inner gear center

Turbulence model constant

Turbulence model constant

Cavitation model constant

Cavitation model constant

Turbulence model constant

Diffusivity of vapor mass fraction

Inner gear eccentricity

Body force (N)

Vapor mass fraction

t

Sij

U

u

u

v

v vx vy x y

Time

Strain tensor

Initial velocity

Velocity component (ms)

Component of v

Velocity vector

Turbulent fluctuation velocity

Velocity in x y direction

Coordinates

Turbulence dissipation

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

11

fg

Gt

ICOR

in

k

L

M

NT

n p

Q

Rc

Re

RPM

Non-condensable gas mass fraction

Turbulent generation term

Instant center of rotation

Inner gear

Turbulence kinetic energy

Length

Mass flow rate (Kgs)

Number of gear teeth

Surface normal

Pressure (Pa)

Flow rate (m3h)

Vapor condensation rate

Vapor generation rate

Revolution per minute

t g l v k l f

Fluid viscosity (Pa-s)

Turbulent viscosity (Pa-s)

Fluid density (kgm3)

Gas density (kgm3)

Liquid density (kgm3)

Vapor density (kgm3)

Surface of control volume

Turbulence model constant

Surface tension

Turbulence model constant

Turbulent Schmidt numberStress tensor

Control volume

Rotation speed

References

[1] Ivantysyn J and Ivantysnova M 2003 Hydrostatic Pumps and Motors (New Delhi

Tech Books International)

[2] Jiang Y and Perng C 1997 An Efficient 3D Transient Computational Model for Vane Oil Pump

and Gerotor Oil Pump Simulations SAE Technical Paper 970841

[3] Kini S Mapara N Thoms R and Chang P 2005 Numerical Simulation of Cover Plate Deflection

in the Gerotor Pump SAE Technical Paper 2005-01-1917

[4] Zhang D Perng C and Laverty M 2006 Gerotor Oil Pump Performance and FlowPressure

Ripple Study SAE Technical Paper 2006-01-0359

[5] Natchimuthu K Sureshkumar J and Ganesan V 2010 CFD Analysis of Flow through a Gerotor

Oil Pump SAE Technical Paper 2010-01-1111

[6] Ruvalcaba M A and Hu X Gerotor Fuel Pump Performance and Leakage Study ASME 2011 Int

Mechanical Engineering Congress amp Exposition (Denver Colorado USA 2011)

[7] Jiang Y Furmanczyk M Lowry S and Zhang D et al 2008 A Three-Dimensional Design Tool

for Crescent Oil Pumps SAE Technical Paper 2008-01-0003

[8] Ding H Visser F C Jiang Y and Furmanczyk M 2011 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 133(1)

011101

[9] Launder B E and Spalding D B 1974 Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 3 269-289

[10] Singhal A K Athavale M M Li H Y and Jiang Y 2002 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 124(3)

617-624

[11] Meincke O and Rahmfeld R 2008 6th Int Fluid Power Conf (Dresden 1-2 April 2008) 485-99

[12] Heisler A Moskwa J and Fronczak F 2009 The Design of Low-Inertia High-Speed External

Gear PumpMotors for Hydrostatic Dynamometer Systems SAE Technical Paper 2009-01-

1117

[13] Wang D Ding H Jiang Y and Xiang X 2012 Numerical Modeling of Vane Oil Pump with

Variable Displacement SAE Technical Paper 2012-01-0637

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

12

Page 13: A CFD model for orbital gerotor motor - IOPscience

fg

Gt

ICOR

in

k

L

M

NT

n p

Q

Rc

Re

RPM

Non-condensable gas mass fraction

Turbulent generation term

Instant center of rotation

Inner gear

Turbulence kinetic energy

Length

Mass flow rate (Kgs)

Number of gear teeth

Surface normal

Pressure (Pa)

Flow rate (m3h)

Vapor condensation rate

Vapor generation rate

Revolution per minute

t g l v k l f

Fluid viscosity (Pa-s)

Turbulent viscosity (Pa-s)

Fluid density (kgm3)

Gas density (kgm3)

Liquid density (kgm3)

Vapor density (kgm3)

Surface of control volume

Turbulence model constant

Surface tension

Turbulence model constant

Turbulent Schmidt numberStress tensor

Control volume

Rotation speed

References

[1] Ivantysyn J and Ivantysnova M 2003 Hydrostatic Pumps and Motors (New Delhi

Tech Books International)

[2] Jiang Y and Perng C 1997 An Efficient 3D Transient Computational Model for Vane Oil Pump

and Gerotor Oil Pump Simulations SAE Technical Paper 970841

[3] Kini S Mapara N Thoms R and Chang P 2005 Numerical Simulation of Cover Plate Deflection

in the Gerotor Pump SAE Technical Paper 2005-01-1917

[4] Zhang D Perng C and Laverty M 2006 Gerotor Oil Pump Performance and FlowPressure

Ripple Study SAE Technical Paper 2006-01-0359

[5] Natchimuthu K Sureshkumar J and Ganesan V 2010 CFD Analysis of Flow through a Gerotor

Oil Pump SAE Technical Paper 2010-01-1111

[6] Ruvalcaba M A and Hu X Gerotor Fuel Pump Performance and Leakage Study ASME 2011 Int

Mechanical Engineering Congress amp Exposition (Denver Colorado USA 2011)

[7] Jiang Y Furmanczyk M Lowry S and Zhang D et al 2008 A Three-Dimensional Design Tool

for Crescent Oil Pumps SAE Technical Paper 2008-01-0003

[8] Ding H Visser F C Jiang Y and Furmanczyk M 2011 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 133(1)

011101

[9] Launder B E and Spalding D B 1974 Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 3 269-289

[10] Singhal A K Athavale M M Li H Y and Jiang Y 2002 J Fluids Eng ndash Trans ASME 124(3)

617-624

[11] Meincke O and Rahmfeld R 2008 6th Int Fluid Power Conf (Dresden 1-2 April 2008) 485-99

[12] Heisler A Moskwa J and Fronczak F 2009 The Design of Low-Inertia High-Speed External

Gear PumpMotors for Hydrostatic Dynamometer Systems SAE Technical Paper 2009-01-

1117

[13] Wang D Ding H Jiang Y and Xiang X 2012 Numerical Modeling of Vane Oil Pump with

Variable Displacement SAE Technical Paper 2012-01-0637

26th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems IOP PublishingIOP Conf Series Earth and Environmental Science 15 (2012) 062006 doi1010881755-1315156062006

12


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