Advances and Trends in Pump Technology Research in the 21st Century

Driven by application demand and the development of fundamental sciences, pump technology research has made significant progress globally in this century. The interdisciplinary nature of pump theory research and technological development has become increasingly evident. People’s understanding of pump operation mechanisms has deepened, the pace of new product development has accelerated, and the performance and reliability of products have continuously improved. Moreover, pump products are gradually becoming more eco-friendly and intelligent. At the same time, under the impetus of national demand and international cooperation and exchange, China’s pump technology research has achieved even greater progress, with a marked enhancement in theoretical research and technological development capabilities, and a gradual integration into the global system. The specific advancements and trends are summarized as follows:

1. Application Aspects:

•    Various large-scale, miniaturized, or specialized pumps have been applied across almost all sectors of the national economy. Future products will feature ecological friendliness, high reliability, intelligence, and informatization. New demands from deep space exploration, deep-sea development, life sciences, and information fields will also drive the development of new pump products.

2. Hydraulic Research:

•    Thanks to the significant progress in CFD technology and the application of advanced testing techniques, people have gained a deeper understanding of internal flows, pressure pulsations, cavitation mechanisms, and transient behaviors within pumps, which supports pump design and operational control. Using computational grids with billions of cells for detailed simulations will be a crucial method for further elucidating internal flow mechanisms in the future, and studies on multiphase flows and transient flows within pumps will remain key areas of focus.

3. Pump Design Technology:

•    After moving away from traditional empirical methods and reliance on hydraulic model libraries, the pump design process has progressed to a digital design phase, showing a strong dependence on CFD and FEA (finite element analysis). Hydraulic design technologies aimed at wide operating conditions and low vibration excitation have also received attention. Artificial intelligence algorithms will be increasingly used in pump design, further freeing designers from traditional model constraints. New materials, processes, and demands will further promote the innovation of pump structures.

4. Vibration and Noise in Pumps:

•    Vibration and noise indicators of products are receiving increasing attention. Unsteady flow simulation, rotor dynamics analysis, and structural modal analysis have been widely applied. A deeper understanding of unsteady excitation from impellers, clearance flow mechanisms, and vibration transmission characteristics has supported the vibration reduction and noise reduction of pump sets. Integrating vibration and noise indicators organically into the product design process and developing pump products with excellent acoustic quality is a goal for the future.

5. Operation and Maintenance Technology of Pumps:

•    The operational efficiency and reliability of pump products have received widespread attention. Regarding the products themselves, ecological design requirements and energy efficiency assessment indicators have been proposed and applied as regulations in some countries. For pump systems, intelligent regulation aimed at energy conservation and intelligent diagnosis of faults have become research hotspots and are the most important application scenarios for the intelligent and informatization technologies of pumps. The full lifecycle operation and maintenance technology of pumps, including remote monitoring, intelligent diagnosis, energy efficiency assessment, and intelligent regulation, is the development goal for the intelligentization of pump systems.