Abstract: For the characteristic parameters identification and cavitation research of centrifugal pump, an improved differential evolutionary identification method with residual correction was proposed in this paper. This method adopted differential evolution algorithm to identify the lift-flow characteristic curves, and then the residuals of original data and identified results were used to correct the errors, thus effectively improved the identification precision. A type of marine centrifugal condensate pump was taken as an instance to verify the above method. Simulation experiments were carried out by adopting the identified lift-flow characteristic curves and the existing condensate piping model. Relations between the rotation speed, lift, flow, condensing water temperature, inlet and outlet pressure of the condensate pump were obtained, and the cavitation rotation speed of this type marine condensate pump was calculated. Based on these, the stable operation boundary of the whole condensate system is also analyzed and obtained.

Key words: centrifugal pump, differential evolution, residual correction, cavitation