Original Article

Proc IMechE Part C:

J Mechanical Engineering Science
Study on inducer and impeller of a 227(2) 311–319
! IMechE 2012

centrifugal pump for a rocket engine Reprints and permissions:

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turbopump DOI: 10.1177/0954406212449939

pic.sagepub.com

Soon-Sam Hong, Dae-Jin Kim, Jin-Sun Kim, Chang-Ho Choi

and Jinhan Kim

Abstract
A hydraulic performance test is conducted for a fuel pump of a liquid rocket engine turbopump. The pump driven by an
electric motor is tested in a water environment. Experimental results indicate that the inducer has a negligible effect on
the head and efficiency of the pump but a significant effect on the cavitation performance. Additionally, an autonomous
inducer test is carried out to investigate the effect of the inducer on the pump performance in more detail, and it is found
out that the pump reaches a critical cavitation point when the inducer head is dropped by 55%. A reduction of required
net positive suction head of the centrifugal pump by attachment of an inducer is also calculated considering the flow
interference between the inducer and the centrifugal impeller, and it is found that the calculation shows a reasonable
agreement with the test.

Keywords
Inducer, impeller, centrifugal pump, cavitation, turbopump

Date received: 21 March 2012; accepted: 3 May 2012

both steady performance and instability in cavitating

Introduction
In typical pumps used in space rocket engines, an indu-
cer is employed upstream of a main centrifugal impeller
in order to avoid unacceptable cavitation, improve the
suction performance, and reduce the propellant tank
pressure and weight. Inducer design is focused on
obtaining sufficient cavitation margin rather than high
efficiency. Therefore, compared with a centrifugal
impeller, a typical inducer has a lower flow coefficient,
a smaller inlet angle, a sharper leading edge, fewer
blades, and higher blade solidities. Many inducers will
operate under slightly cavitating conditions. The head
rise of an inducer has to be just large enough to sup-
press cavitation in the main pump impeller. Many pub-
lications have been devoted to the design of turbopump
inducers.1–8 A design manual by Jakobsen1 provides
general background information and some publica-
tions2–4 apply the rules of the design manual1 to the
inducer design at the turbopump system level. A book
by Brennen5 contains many examples of inducer per-
formance data. Japikse6 reviews some of the design
methods, flow observations, and design practices for
commercial pump inducers. Some papers7,8 address
the inducer design criteria from the perspective of
flow. Inducers often suffer from cavitation instabil-
ities9–11 such as rotating cavitation, cavitation surge,
and alternating blade cavitation which sometimes
cause serious shaft vibration and strong flow
fluctuation.
With regard to the steady performance of inducers,
inducer head rise and inducer head breakdown are
important issues. The required net positive suction
head (NPSH) of a centrifugal pump is reduced by
employing an inducer upstream of a centrifugal impel-
ler, but the amount of reduction of the required NPSH
is less than the head rise produced by the inducer.
Takamatsu et al.12 derived a formula semi-empirically
to estimate the required NPSH of a centrifugal pump
with inducer from individual cavitation performances
of the inducer and the centrifugal impeller. They12 also
proposed a graphical procedure for the estimation of
Korea Aerospace Research Institute, Daejeon, Republic of Korea
Corresponding author:
SS Hong, Korea Aerospace Research Institute, Daejeon 305-333,
Republic of Korea
Email: sshong@kari.re.kr
312
the required NPSH of a pump when the required
NPSH of pump without inducer and the cavitation per-
formance curves of inducers are known (Figure 1).
They12 used the following equation

NPSHre ¼ ½Hi mþi 
h
where
NPSHre is the amount of reduction of the
required NPSH of a centrifugal pump by attachment
of inducer, ½Hi mþi the inducer head rise at critical con-
dition, and
h the head reduction due to the occurrence
of flow interference between the inducer and the centri-
fugal impeller.
The first objective of this article is to show experi-
mentally the effect of an inducer on a centrifugal pump,
and therefore, a series of tests are carried out.
Conventional hydraulic and cavitation performance
tests are performed with a fuel pump for a liquid
rocket engine,13 and then, pump tests without the indu-
cer are performed. Additionally, autonomous inducer
tests are carried out to evaluate the performance of the
inducer itself and to discover the correlation between
the inducer and the impeller in terms of cavitation. The
second objective of this article is to estimate the reduc-
tion of the required NPSH of the centrifugal pump. The
reduction of the required NPSH is estimated consider-
ing the flow interference between the inducer and the
centrifugal impeller and it is compared to the test result.
The estimating method is presented here to give a tool
for the calculation of the required NPSH of centrifugal
pumps with inducer.
With inducer Without inducer
Pump head
ΔNPSH re
NPSH
Inducer head
[H i ]m +i Δh
45
NPSH
Figure 1. Estimation of the required NPSH of the pump.12
NPSH: net positive suction head.
Proc IMechE Part C: J Mechanical Engineering Science 227(2)
Test facilities
The pump under investigation in this study has a spe-
cific speed of 0.278 (760 US units of gal/min, ft, r/min)
and its rotating part is composed of a three-bladed axial
ð1Þ flow inducer (inlet tip blade angle 10.4 , outlet mean
blade angle 17 , and tip solidity 2.6) and a seven-bladed
centrifugal flow shrouded impeller with inlet mean
blade angle 19 . The inducer and the impeller are
shown in Figure 2. The pump is designed to operate
under the nominal condition of mass flow rate 29.1 kg/
s, inlet pressure 0.28 MPa, outlet pressure 13.2 MPa,
and rotational speed 20,000 r/min.13 A full-scale impel-
ler and inducer are used in the tests. Both a pump test
with the inducer and a pump test without the inducer
are carried out to investigate the effect of the inducer on
the pump performance. The nominal rotational speed
of the pump is 20,000 r/min, but the pump and inducer
are tested at reduced speed due to the power limit of the
electric motors. In the pump test without the inducer, a
dummy spacer with the same hub shape of the inducer
is installed in the place of the inducer. Tests are con-
ducted in two test facilities, that is, a pump perform-
ance test facility and an inducer performance test
facility. The measurement accuracy is estimated to be
0.3% for the head, 0.4% for the flow rate, 0.6% for the
efficiency, and 0.3% for the NPSH.
Figure 2. Inducer and impeller.
Hong et al. 313

In terms of non-cavitating performance, the test
speed lower than the one used for the design seems to
have a negligible effect on the applicability of the results
because Reynolds number has a negligible effect if it is
higher than a million.14 Reynolds number, which is
based on the wheel tip speed and the rotor diameter,
for the pump and inducer tested here is much higher
than a million. However, the cavitating performance
from the lower speed might be a little different from
that of the design speed. Nevertheless, in terms of cavi-
tation, the matching of the inducer and the impeller in
this study seems to be useful because the speed differ-
ence between the inducer and impeller tests is small.
Pump performance test facility
Hydraulic and cavitation tests for the pump are con-
ducted in a pump test facility,15,16 where the pump is
driven by an electric motor (Figure 3). The working
5 6 7 TP100 model). The inducer is driven by a variable-
0m 1m
1 and 37 kW. The inducer is followed by a collector with
3 2 1. Test pump
4 2. Regulating valve
3. Turbine flow meter
4. Water tank
5. Torque meter
6. Gear box
7. Motor
Figure 3. Plane view of pump performance test facility.
fluid is water at room temperature and measurement
parameters are pump head, flow rate, power, efficiency,
etc. The facility is composed of a water tank, an electric
motor, a gearbox, a torque meter (Magtrol, TMHS 212
model), and a turbine type flow meter (Hoffer, Ho 4  4
model). The water tank has a volume of 3 m3 and its
pressure is adjusted using a vacuum pump and com-
pressed air. The pump is driven by a variable-speed elec-
tric motor with a capacity of 300 kW. The rotational
speed of the pump is set to 8300 r/min in this study.
Inducer performance test facility
Hydraulic and cavitation tests of the inducer are carried
out at an inducer test facility,17,18 which has a structure
similar to that of the pump performance test facility.
The working fluid is water at room temperature. The
facility (Figure 4), which is similar to the pump test
facility, contains a water tank with a volume of 0.9 m3,
an electric motor, a torque meter (Magtrol, TM 208
model), and a turbine type flow meter (TRIMEC,
speed electric motor with a capacity of 10,000 r/min
a rectangular cross section whose area is constant along
the circumference (Figure 5). In this study, the rota-
tional speed of the inducer is set to 6000 r/min.
Results and discussion
Pump performance
Head characteristics of the pump are presented in
Figure 6. The head decreases with increasing flow rate

1. Water tank 6. Torque meter

0m 1m 2. Turbine flow meter 7. Motor
3. Settling chamber 8. Booster pump
4. Test inducer 9. Regulating valve
5. Collector 10. Heat exchanger
8

10 9

3 4 5
2 6 7

Figure 4. Plane view of inducer performance test facility.

314 Proc IMechE Part C: J Mechanical Engineering Science 227(2)

within the tested flow rate range. It is shown in Figure 6
that the head from the pump test without the inducer is
almost identical to the value of the pump with the indu-
cer, which means that the effect of the inducer on the
head characteristic of the pump is negligible for the
pump.
Efficiency characteristics of the pump are presented
in Figure 7. The efficiency increases with flow rate
within the tested flow rate range. Throughout the
tested flow range, the efficiency of the pump without
the inducer is relatively about 1% higher than that of
the pump with the inducer, which implies that the
hydraulic efficiency of the inducer is lower than that
of the impeller. Moreover, this result shows that the
effect of the inducer on the efficiency characteristic of
the pump is still small for the pump.
A cavitation performance test is conducted near a
design flow coefficient condition, and the results are
shown in Figure 8. The dimensionless required NPSH
(based on the critical condition of 3% head drop),
or NPSHre =Hpump,nom is about 0.0058 for the pump
with inducer. Without the inducer, however,
NPSHre =Hpump,nom increases up to 0.0215. This means
that the cavitation performance without the inducer
deteriorates remarkably compared to the pump with
the inducer. Additionally, the shapes of the cavitation
performance curves are different from each other: with
a further decrease in the NPSH after the critical

COLLECTOR 1.15
with inducer
1.10 without inducer

1.05
pump, nom
INDUCER 1.00
FLOW

0.95
/η
pump

0.90
η

0.85

0.80

0.75
0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0 1.1 1.2
Q/Q
nom

Figure 5. Schematic of test section of inducer performance

test facility. Figure 7. Effect of inducer on pump efficiency.

1.10
with inducer
without inducer 1.0
1.05

1.00 0.8
pump, nom
pump, nom

0.95
/H
/H

with inducer
0.6 without inducer
pump
pump

H
H

0.90
0.4
0.85

0.80 0.2
0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0 1.1 1.2 0.00 0.01 0.02 0.03
Q/Q NPSH / H
nom pump, nom

Figure 6. Effect of inducer on pump head. Figure 8. Effect of inducer on pump cavitation performance.
Hong et al. 315

condition, the head decreases slowly for the case with-
out the inducer, while the head drop is very sharp for
the pump with the inducer. The difference between the
cavitation performance curves may result from the fact
that an inducer can function even on cavitating condi-
tion. Once the cavitation at the inducer reaches the
threshold, then even a slight decrease in the suction
pressure might result in a serious cavitation at the
main impeller.
During the cavitation test, the pump vibration is
measured by attaching an accelerometer on the pump
volute casing in the radial direction. The acceleration
signal is acquired at a sampling rate of 50 kHz through-
out the cavitation test. The characteristics of the pump
vibration are shown in Figure 9 together with the pump
head, which are identical to the results in Figure 8. No
filter is applied to the acceleration signal, and the root
mean square (RMS) value is presented. The vibration
level increases when the head decreases due to the
pump cavitation, and it increases sharply at the
region of head breakdown. It is interesting that
the vibration level in the case without the inducer is
higher than that with the inducer even at the NPSH
above the critical cavitating condition. The cavitation
bubble at the impeller should have a larger effect on the
vibration level than that of the inducer because the
power consumed at the impeller is much higher than
that of the inducer. There seems to be almost no bubble
at the impeller in the case with the inducer at
NPSH=Hpump,nom above 0.006; however, it seems that
there is a small quantity of bubbles in the case without
the inducer even at NPSH=Hpump,nom near 0.030.
Therefore, there seems to be a difference in the vibra-
tion level between the two cases. At the NPSH region
500
just before the critical cavitation condition, the vibra-
tion level experiences a dip for the case without the
inducer, while there is no such dip for the case with
the inducer. However, it is not clear yet why they
show a different vibration behavior near the critical
cavitation condition.
Inducer performance
To investigate the effect of the inducer on the pump
performance in more detail, an autonomous test of
the inducer, which is taken from the previously tested
pump, is conducted. The inducer head is evaluated
from the pressure difference between the inlet settling
chamber and the collector. In Figure 10, the inducer
head is presented together with the pump head. Both
the inducer head and the pump head decrease with the
flow rate, but the relative decrement of the inducer head
is much greater than that of the pump head. In
Figure 10, inducer head ratio ranges from 0.03 to
0.05 in the flow range Q=Qnom 0.87–1.11. Typically,
the inducer head forms 2–10% of the pump head.19
A cavitation test of the inducer is carried out and the
results are presented together with the results for the
pump in Figure 11. The curves are obtained near a
design flow coefficient condition. The shape of the cavi-
tation performance curve of the inducer is very different
from those of the pump. With a decrease in the NPSH,
the inducer head decreases slowly, while the pump head
drops abruptly. The slowly decreasing characteristic of
the inducer head curve implies that the inducer could
work even when the inducer cavitation develops to a
certain extent. In turbopumps, cavitation occurs at an
inducer first and then propagates downstream to the
main impeller. In Figure 11, the pump with the inducer
still maintains a normal head while the inducer head

1.0
1.10 0.08
400
[m/s ]
2

0.8 1.05
RMS
pump, nom

300
Casing acceleration

with inducer without inducer Pump

pump, nom

1.00 0.06
pump, nom
/H

0.6
pump

200
/H

0.95
/H
H

inducer
pump

0.4 100 0.04

H

0.90
H

0.2 0 0.85
0 0.01 0.02 0.03 Inducer
NPSH / H
pump, nom 0.80 0.02
0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0 1.1 1.2
Q/Q
nom
Figure 9. Effect of inducer on pump casing vibration at cavita-
tion test.
RMS: root mean square. Figure 10. Head of pump and inducer.
316 Proc IMechE Part C: J Mechanical Engineering Science 227(2)

0.06 1.0
Pump
1.0 Inducer
0.05

0.8

pump, nom
0.04
pump, nom

0.6

/H
0.03
/H

λ
inducer
pump

0.4 0.02
H

H
0.2 0.01

0.0 0.00 0.1

0.00 0.01 0.02 0.03 0.04 0.05 0.06 -4 0 4 8 12
NPSH / H
pump, nom
i [deg]

Figure 11. Cavitation performance of pump and inducer. Figure 12. Dynamic depression coefficient vs incidence angle
on centrifugal impeller blade.7

drops significantly, for example, by 40%. By extrapo-

lating the cavitation curve of the inducer, it is found
that the pump reaches a critical cavitation point when
the inducer head drops by 55%. Hinducer =Hpump,nom is
about 0.022 at the critical cavitation condition while
0.048 at the non-cavitating one. For inducers applied
to rocket turbopumps, one usually looks for at least a
10% head drop as a critical cavitation point and it is
not uncommon to consider a 50% head drop.6,8
Estimation of reduction of required NPSH of a
centrifugal pump with inducer
Takamatsu et al.12 derived a formula to estimate the
required NPSH of a centrifugal pump with inducer, and
the formula is used in this study. The critical NPSH of a
centrifugal pump without inducer is expressed by the
following equation
 2 
V W2
½NPSHre m ¼ þ
2g 2g m
where V and W are absolute and relative velocities,
respectively, at the inlet of centrifugal impeller and 
an empirical coefficient, which is called dynamic depres-
sion coefficient, representing the local pressure drop on
the blade inlet of a centrifugal impeller. The values
under the critical cavitation condition of the centrifugal
pump with and without inducer are denoted by ½ mþi
and ½ m , respectively. The critical NPSH of a centrifu-
gal pump with an inducer is expressed by the following
equation
 
V2 W2
½NPSHre mþi þ ½Hi mþi ¼ þ
2g 2g
Therefore, the reduction of the required NPSH of a
centrifugal pump by the attachment of an inducer is
derived from equations (2) and (3)

NPSHre ¼ ½NPSHre m  ½NPSHre mþi ¼ ½Hi mþi
 2   2  
V W2 V W2
 þ  þ
2g 2g mþi 2g 2g m
ð4Þ
Now, we just have to calculate the right-hand side of
equation (4) to obtain the reduction of the required
NPSH,
NPSHre : Note that the curly bracket on the
right-hand side of equation (4) is
h in equation (1).
Calculation of
h or the curly bracket on the right-
hand side of equation (4) is carried out step by step.
First, the velocities at the impeller inlet without inducer
are calculated from a simple velocity triangle on the
condition of zero inlet prewhirl. Second, the velocities
ð2Þ at the impeller inlet with inducer are calculated by a
commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) com-
putation. The velocities at the inlet of the centrifugal
impeller are calculated here on non-cavitating condi-
tions because the measured velocities at cavitating con-
dition are very similar to those of non-cavitating one.12
Third, the coefficient  in equation (4) is obtained using
a chart for centrifugal impeller (Figure 12) which
Furukawa and Ishizaka7 presented. The coefficient 
values for centrifugal, diagonal, and axial impellers
are presented in Furukawa and Ishizaka.7
The CFD used here is the three-dimensional
Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes method.20 The
authors used the method in previous studies to calcu-
ð3Þ late the flow in inducers, and the method shows a good
mþi
agreement with the experiments.16,18 The method uses
Hong et al. 317

0.06
Pump
1.0 Inducer
w/ inducer w/o inducer
0.05

0.8

pump, nom
0.04

pump, nom
ΔNPSH / H by test
re pump, nom

0.6

/H
0.03

/H

inducer
pump
0.4 0.02

H
ΔNPSH / H by estimation
re pump, nom

0.2 0.01
Δh / H
pump, nom

0.0 0.00
0.00 0.01 0.02 0.03 0.04 0.05 0.06
NPSH / H
pump, nom

Figure 14. Comparison of reduction of the required NPSH by

Figure 13. Grids for computation of inducer and impeller.
an explicit Runge–Kutta scheme and second-order-
accurate central-difference scheme with artificial dissi-
pation for integration in time and space. The k-" tur-
bulence model with an extended wall function is used to
simulate the turbulence effects. A uniform flow condi-
tion is imposed at the inlet of the inducer and static
pressure is assigned at the impeller outlet. Periodic
boundary conditions are set at corresponding positions,
because only one flow passage is solved for the inducer
and impeller. Grids for the computation of inducer and
impeller are presented in Figure 13. The cell number for
the computation is 314,249. The value of yþ, the dimen-
sionless quantity of the distance of the first grid point
from the wall, is kept between 10 and 50 because the
wall function is used. Mean value of velocity compo-
nents is obtained by mass average of the computational
flow results at the impeller inlet.
Now, only ½Hi mþi is unknown on the right-hand side
of equation (4). To solve equation (4), a graphical
method proposed by Takamatsu et al.,12 which is illu-
strated Figure 1, is applied to the present case, as shown
in Figure 14. It is noted that the abscissa and the right-
hand ordinate in Figure 14 are drawn with the same
scale. Equation (4) can be written as follows by rear-
ranging it and using
h
½Hi mþi þ ½NPSHre mþi ¼ ½NPSHre m þ
h
where
h is calculated by the previous procedure.
Then, the 45 line intersects with the extrapolated cavi-
tation curve of the inducer at NPSH=Hpump,nom 0.0045.
Therefore,
NPSHre =Hpump,nom is 0.0170 from the esti-
mation, while it is 0.0157 from the test.
estimation and test.
NPSH: net positive suction head.
A few assumptions are used for the estimation, for
example: (a) the velocities at the impeller inlet at the
cavitating condition are similar to those of the non-
cavitating condition; (b) the cavitation curve is still
valid at the extrapolated region; and (c) the effect of
the rotational speed on the cavitation performance is
negligible. In spite of the assumptions, the estimation
shows a reasonable agreement with the test case in
Figure 14.
Conclusions
Hydraulic performance tests for a fuel pump of a rocket
engine turbopump are conducted in water environment
in order to see the effect of an inducer on pump per-
formance. The main results are summarized as follows:
1. By performing pump tests with and without an
inducer, it is experimentally shown that the inducer
has a negligible effect on the head and efficiency of
the pump, but a significant effect on the cavitation
performance. The critical NPSH of the pump
increases more than three times when the pump is
tested without the inducer. The above result might
be unsurprising since this is the reason that inducers
are used. However, the function of the inducer is
illustrated by an experiment in this study.
2. By performing an autonomous inducer test, it is
ð5Þ found that the pump reaches a critical cavitation
point of 3% head drop when the inducer head
drops by 55%. A 3% head drop is the acceptable
operating regime for industrial pumps. However,
for inducers applied to rocket turbopumps, one usu-
ally looks for at least a 10% head drop as a critical
cavitation point.
318
3. The shapes of cavitation performance curves (chart of
head vs NPSH) with the inducer is different from the
case without the inducer: with a further decrease in the
NPSH after the critical condition, the head decreases
slowly for the case without the inducer, while the head
drop is very sharp for the pump with the inducer.
Once the cavitation at the inducer reaches the thresh-
old, then even a slight decrease in the NPSH could
result in a serious cavitation at the main impeller.
4. The vibration level increases when the head
decreases due to the pump cavitation, and it
increases sharply at the region of head breakdown.
The vibration level in the case without the inducer is
higher than that of the case with the inducer at both
the head breakdown and constant head regimes.
5. A reduction of the required NPSH of the centrifugal
pump by attachment of an inducer is estimated con-
sidering the flow interference between the inducer
and the centrifugal impeller. A formula and a graph-
ical method which were introduced in Takamatsu
et al.12 are applied in this study. The estimating pro-
cedure is: (a) the velocities at the impeller inlet with-
out inducer are calculated from a simple velocity
triangle; (b) the velocities at the impeller inlet with
inducer are calculated by a commercial CFD; (c) the
dynamic depression coefficient is obtained using a
chart;7 and (d) a graphical method is used. The esti-
mation shows a reasonable agreement with the test
case in spite of a few assumptions.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding
agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
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NUMECA International, Brussels, 2006.
Appendix
Notation
H head
NPSHre required NPSH
Q volumetric flow rate
V absolute velocity at the inlet of the cen-
trifugal impeller
W relative velocity at the inlet of the cen-
trifugal impeller

h head reduction due to flow interference
between an inducer and the centrifugal
impeller

NPSHre reduction of the required NPSH of a
centrifugal pump by attachment of an
inducer
Hong et al. 319

 dynamic depression coefficient m critical cavitation condition of the cen-

 efficiency trifugal pump without an inducer
mþi critical cavitation condition of the cen-
trifugal pump with an inducer
Subscripts
nom nominal flow coefficient condition at
tested rotational speed