The European Union pursues ambitious objectives reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, energy related products (ERP) are regulated by the European Union's Ecodesign Directive in terms of energy efficiency. Until now positive displacement pumps are not involved. However, considering the EU strategy in similar domains, the probability is high that the Ecodesign Directive will focus on positive displacement pumps in the future due to the large quantity of sold pumps and the collective energy consumption.

Positive displacement pumps are characterized by their wide range of applications, e.g. mobile hydraulics, chemical, or food industry, with very different application-relevant requirements (low pulsation, high precision etc.). For this reason, a variety of pump designs exist, e.g. piston pumps, gear pump or screw pumps.

From a scientific and technical point of view, legal requirements are considered adequate if they take into account the physical behavior of the machines as well as the application-relevant requirements. Against this background, the authors presented a physically based approach towards an application-related efficiency guideline at IREC 2016 considering a methodology to identify the energetically relevant applications of positive displacement pumps and introducing a physically based, type independent and easy to apply efficiency model.

Since 2017, within the framework of an AiF project, the authors collaborate with the VDMA to validate the above mentioned efficiency model by means of precise experimental measurements. Until the submission of this paper, efficiency measurements are conducted on gear pumps, screw pumps and rotary piston pumps. The full paper presents the validation results and discusses the conclusions in the context of a future energy efficiency guideline of positive displacement pumps.