Cleanability within closed process plants and equipment with pumps is critical and crucial not only in the food industry. Positive displacement pumps are often – due to their construction – challenging to clean in the process, (CIP). Following a standardized cleaning test NETZSCH started its analysis of the NEMO® progressing cavity pump. These kind of pumps are often used for higher viscous media, which make a quick cleaning process challenging. The task for many users is to reduce production downtime and increase the ease and speed of interrupting processes such as cleaning. 

NETZSCH Pumps & Systems, as leading manufacturer of positive displacement pumps and as partner of its customers considers science based procedures and methods such as real tests and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to improve the fulfillment of these requirements. CFD has been proven as a tool which can be used by manufacturers to facilitate their equipment design for high hygienic standards even before constructing any prototypes or optimize an existing design. The study of hydrodynamic cleanability of closed processing equipment was used based on modelling the flow in a NEMO® progressing cavity pump. Results show that cleaning can be very efficient in complex geometries.

The degree of turbulences and type of flow pattern can be determined with CFD and tested with real pumps in the NETZSCH in-house test laboratory. Even though easy and reliably cleanable positive displacement pumps are on the market for many decades, there is still quite a large room for improvements and optimization. Beside the aim to construct the best cleanable pump with these proven methods NETZSCH also optimized the pump geometries towards gentle handling of the media by further improving the flow through the pump housing. Sustainable, safe production with less downtime and high quality results on pumping operation can be ensured.