Experimental Study on Energy Consumption and Hydraulic Stability for Distributed Pumping System

Distributed pumping system demonstrates advantages in energy saving and hydraulic stability. This paper analyzes the mechanism of the distributed pumping system for energy saving and studies the characteristics of energy consumption under the design condition, as well as the flow regulation operations in the conventional pumping system and in the distributed pumping systems. The experimental results show that the distributed pumping system saves about 12 % energy under the design condition compared with the conventional pumping system and around 39 % energy when the mixing ratio (μ) is unity for the conventional pumping system. Also, the dimensionless flow rate is adopted as an index to evaluate the hydraulic stability of the distributed pumping system. The experimental results also show that positioning the datum point of zero pressure at the central part of the main pipes, equipping the equalizer pipes among the pumps, and reducing the pressure losses in the main pipes efficiently improve the hydraulic stability of the distributed pumping system.