The Hydraulic Institute (HI) Standard for Pump Intake Design (ANSI/HI 9.8) is a normative standard which has long relied on scale physical modeling to verify adequate pump intake hydraulics that will promote optimal pump performance. These standards have been developed over many years and review cycles and has been validated on a number of model studies and have resulted in thousands of successful installations. Currently, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling cannot be used to demonstrate compliance with this standard, which has been questioned during recent standard review cycles. During the process of completing the 2016 standard, the HI Pump Intake Design Committee recognized the need for a rigorous workplan to help determine if the role of CFD as it pertains to the intake design standard should be expanded.

The committee developed a workplan consisting of a literature review of past CFD work related to intake design, development of best practice guidelines, development of CFD model evaluation methodologies, and the execution of blind round robin simulations to evaluate the methodologies and consistency of results. This technical paper outlines the test case and results found during this testing and provides a summary of future work.

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