View Single Post
Unread 07-14-2002, 01:34 PM   #10
Skulemate
Cooling Savant
 
Skulemate's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: Toronto, Canada
Posts: 381
Default

Pardon me, but I think that cavitation is much different than air flowing through the pump. Cavitation is actually the formation (and eventual collapse) of vapour cavities. The collapse is associated with very high water velocities that can be very damaging to the impeller or housing.

However, it occurs when the pressure in the liquid being pumped falls below its vapour pressure. This can happen several ways:
- if the suction lift is too great
- impellor speed is too fast
- liquid temperature is too high

To aviod cavitation the pressure in the suction line must be greater than the vapour pressure of the liquid (that's where the net positive suction head comes in). Now, I seriously doubt (though I have been wrong before ) that any of us have pumps capable of causing cavitation in our small systems.
__________________
Michael E. Robbins
M.A.Sc. Candidate, University of Toronto

12.1 GHz of AMD's finest (17.7 GHz total) crunching proudly for the AMDMB.com Killer Frogs
SETI BOINC: Dual Opteron 246s (Iwill DK8N) | XP2800+ (Shuttle SN41G2) | 3x XP2400+ (ASUS A7N266-vm)
SETI BOINC: 2x P4 2.8E (ASUS P4R800-vm) | Crunching 24/7
Skulemate is offline   Reply With Quote