Prediction of cavitation erosion on stainless steel components in centrifugal pumps

The Research Committee on Cavitation Erosion in the Turbomachinery Society of Japan has already reported the prediction method of cavitation erosion rate. However, the scattering between the predicted rate and the measured rate is 100 times. In this study, we compare fundamental data of stainless steels collected by the Committee with the data obtained in our laboratory. The influence of material and liquid parameters on the scattering of the Committee data is discussed. We found that the scattering was influenced by high liquid temperature, the kind of liquids, the microstructure of components and the operating life. We propose a modified prediction equation including these parameters, and found that the equation improve the accuracy of the erosion prediction.