• Publisher-DOI

Gear pumps are used in numerous different applications and industrial sectors. However, when selecting a suitable gear pump for a specified application, manufacturers are often confronted with a lack of comparable measurement data for the desired combination of operating conditions and pumping fluid. Consequently, an estimation of the volume flow rate and the power consumption of a pump under the operating conditions of the application is necessary. In this context, this paper discusses the application of similarity on external gear pumps and presents its validation by means of measured pump characteristics. Seven gear pumps of different displacement volume are measured at different operating conditions varying pressure, rotational speed and the viscosity of the pumping fluid. The validation results prove that similarity is useful to represent a pump’s characteristic over a wide operating range. The prediction of the volume flow rate and the power consumption at a changed viscosity show good accuracy. However, the scaling of the pump characteristic based on the displacement volume show contradictory results.