Numerical Simulation of the Flow Field around a 30° Inclined Flat Plate

This paper presents a CFD analysis of the flow around a 30° inclined flat plate of infinite span. Numerical predictions have been compared to experimental measurements, in order to assess the potential of the finite volume code of determining the aerodynamic forces acting on a flat plate invested by a fluid stream of infinite extent. Several turbulence models and spatial node distributions have been tested and flow field characteristics in the neighborhood of the flat plate have been numerically investigated, allowing the development of a preliminary procedure to be used as guidance in selecting the appropriate grid configuration and the corresponding turbulence model for the prediction of the flow field over a twodimensional inclined plate.

Computational Fluid Dynamics Expert System using Artificial Neural Networks

The design of a modern aircraft is based on three pillars: theoretical results, experimental test and computational simulations. As a results of this, Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) solvers are widely used in the aeronautical field. These solvers require the correct selection of many parameters in order to obtain successful results. Besides, the computational time spent in the simulation depends on the proper choice of these parameters. In this paper we create an expert system capable of making an accurate prediction of the number of iterations and time required for the convergence of a computational fluid dynamic (CFD) solver. Artificial neural network (ANN) has been used to design the expert system. It is shown that the developed expert system is capable of making an accurate prediction the number of iterations and time required for the convergence of a CFD solver.

Influence of Calcium Intake Level to Osteoporptic Vertebral bone and Degenerated Disc in Biomechanical Study

The aim of the present study is to analyze the generation of osteoporotic vertebral bone induced by lack of calcium during growth period and analyze its effects for disc degeneration, based on biomechanical and histomorphometrical study. Mechanical and histomorphological characteristics of lumbar vertebral bones and discs of rats with calcium free diet (CFD) were detected and tracked by using high resolution in-vivo micro-computed tomography (in-vivo micro-CT), finite element (FE) and histological analysis. Twenty female Sprague-Dawley rats (6 weeks old, approximate weight 170g) were randomly divided into two groups (CFD group: 10, NOR group: 10). The CFD group was maintained on a refmed calcium-controlled semisynthetic diet without added calcium, to induce osteoporosis. All lumbar (L 1-L6) were scanned by using in vivo micro-CT with 35i.un resolution at 0, 4, 8 weeks to track the effects of CFD on the generation of osteoporosis. The fmdings of the present study indicated that calcium insufficiency was the main factor in the generation of osteoporosis and it induced lumbar vertebral disc degeneration. This study is a valuable experiment to firstly evaluate osteoporotic vertebral bone and disc degeneration induced by lack of calcium during growth period from a biomechanical and histomorphometrical point of view.

Numerical Study of Hypersonic Glide Vehicle based on Blunted Waverider

The waverider is proved to be a remarkably useful configuration for hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) in terms of the high lift-to-drag ratio. Due to the severe aerodynamic heating and the processing technical restriction, the sharp leading edge of waverider should be blunted, and then the flow characteristics and the aerodynamic performance along the trajectory will change. In this paper, the flow characteristics of a HGV, including the rarefied gas effect and transition phenomenon, were studied based on a reference trajectory. A numerical simulation was carried out to study the performance of the HGV under a typical condition.

Development of Thermal Model by Performance Verification of Heat Pipe Subsystem for Electronic Cooling under Space Environment

Heat pipes are used to control the thermal problem for electronic cooling. It is especially difficult to dissipate heat to a heat sink in an environment in space compared to earth. For solving this problem, in this study, the Poiseuille (Po) number, which is the main measure of the performance of a heat pipe, is studied by CFD; then, the heat pipe performance is verified with experimental results. A heat pipe is then fabricated for a spatial environment, and an in-house code is developed. Further, a heat pipe subsystem, which consists of a heat pipe, MLI (Multi Layer Insulator), SSM (Second Surface Mirror), and radiator, is tested and correlated with the TMM (Thermal Mathematical Model) through a commercial code. The correlation results satisfy the 3K requirement, and the generated thermal model is verified for application to a spatial environment.

Power Generation Potential of Dynamic Architecture

The main aim of this work is to establish the capabilities of new green buildings to ascertain off-grid electricity generation based on the integration of wind turbines in the conceptual model of a rotating tower [2] in Dubai. An in depth performance analysis of the WinWind 3.0MW [3] wind turbine is performed. Data based on the Dubai Meteorological Services is collected and analyzed in conjunction with the performance analysis of this wind turbine. The mathematical model is compared with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) results based on a conceptual rotating tower design model. The comparison results are further validated and verified for accuracy by conducting experiments on a scaled prototype of the tower design. The study concluded that integrating wind turbines inside a rotating tower can generate enough electricity to meet the required power consumption of the building, which equates to a wind farm containing 9 horizontal axis wind turbines located at an approximate area of 3,237,485 m2 [14].

Comparison of Two Airfoil Sections for Application in Straight-Bladed Darrieus VAWT

This paper presents a model for the evaluation of energy performance and aerodynamic forces acting on a small straight-bladed Darrieus-type vertical axis wind turbine depending on blade geometrical section. It consists of an analytical code coupled to a solid modeling software, capable of generating the desired blade geometry based on the desired blade design geometric parameters. Such module is then linked to a finite volume commercial CFD code for the calculation of rotor performance by integration of the aerodynamic forces along the perimeter of each blade for a full period of revolution.After describing and validating the computational model with experimental data, the results of numerical simulations are proposed on the bases of two candidate airfoil sections, that is a classical symmetrical NACA 0021 blade profile and the recently developed DU 06-W-200 non-symmetric and laminar blade profile.Through a full CFD campaign of analysis, the effects of blade geometrical section on angle of attack are first investigated and then the overall rotor torque and power are analyzed as a function of blade azimuthal position, achieving a numerical quantification of the influence of airfoil geometry on overall rotor performance.

Distortion of Flow Measurement and Cavitation Occurs Due to Orifice Inlet Velocity Profiles

This analysis investigates the distortion of flow measurement and the increase of cavitation along orifice flowmeter. The analysis using the numerical method (CFD) validated the distortion of flow measurement through the inlet velocity profile considering the convergence and grid dependency. Realizable k-e model was selected and y+ was about 50 in this numerical analysis. This analysis also estimated the vulnerability of cavitation effect due to inlet velocity profile. The investigation concludes that inclined inlet velocity profile could vary the pressure which was measured at pressure tab near pipe wall and it led to distort the pressure values ranged from -3.8% to 5.3% near the orifice plate and to make the increase of cavitation. The investigation recommends that the fully developed inlet velocity flow is beneficial to accurate flow measurement in orifice flowmeter.

Influence of Dilution and Lean-premixed on Mild Combustion in an Industrial Burner

Understanding of how and where NOx formation occurs in industrial burner is very important for efficient and clean operation of utility burners. Also the importance of this problem is mainly due to its relation to the pollutants produced by more burners used widely of gas turbine in thermal power plants and glass and steel industry. In this article, a numerical model of an industrial burner operating in MILD combustion is validated with experimental data.. Then influence of air flow rate and air temperature on combustor temperature profiles and NOX product are investigated. In order to modification this study reports on the effects of fuel and air dilution (with inert gases H2O, CO2, N2), and also influence of lean-premixed of fuel, on the temperature profiles and NOX emission. Conservation equations of mass, momentum and energy, and transport equations of species concentrations, turbulence, combustion and radiation modeling in addition to NO modeling equations were solved together to present temperature and NO distribution inside the burner. The results shows that dilution, cause to a reduction in value of temperature and NOX emission, and suppresses any flame propagation inside the furnace and made the flame inside the furnace invisible. Dilution with H2O rather than N2 and CO2 decreases further the value of the NOX. Also with raise of lean-premix level, local temperature of burner and the value of NOX product are decreases because of premixing prevents local “hot spots" within the combustor volume that can lead to significant NOx formation. Also leanpremixing of fuel with air cause to amount of air in reaction zone is reach more than amount that supplied as is actually needed to burn the fuel and this act lead to limiting NOx formation

CFD Flow and Heat Transfer Simulation for Empty and Packed Fixed Bed Reactor in Catalytic Cracking of Naphtha

This work aims to test the application of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling to fixed bed catalytic cracking reactors. Studies of CFD with a fixed bed design commonly use a regular packing with N=2 to define bed geometry. CFD allows us to obtain a more accurate view of the fluid flow and heat transfer mechanisms present in fixed bed equipment. Naphtha was used as feedstock and the reactor length was 80cm. It is divided in three sections that catalyst bed packed in the middle section of the reactor. The reaction scheme was involved one primary reaction and 24 secondary reactions. Because of high CPU times in these simulations, parallel processing have been used. In this study the coke formation process in fixed bed and empty tube reactor was simulated and coke in these reactors are compared. In addition, the effect of steam ratio and feed flow rate on coke formation was investigated.

Verification of a Locked CFD Approach to Cool Down Modeling

Increasing demand on the performance of Subsea Production Systems (SPS) suggests a need for more detailed investigation of fluid behavior taking place in subsea equipment. Complete CFD cool down analyses of subsea equipment are very time demanding. The objective of this paper is to investigate a Locked CFD approach, which enables significant reduction of the computational time and at the same time maintains sufficient accuracy during thermal cool down simulations. The result comparison of a dead leg simulation using the Full CFD and the three LCFD-methods confirms the validity of the locked flow field assumption for the selected case. For the tested case the LCFD simulation speed up by factor of 200 results in the absolute thermal error of 0.5 °C (3% relative error), speed up by factor of 10 keeps the LCFD results within 0.1 °C (0.5 % relative error) comparing to the Full CFD.

A Comparative Study of Transient Flow through Cerebral Aneurysms using CFD

The recent advances in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can be useful in observing the detailed hemodynamics in cerebral aneurysms for understanding not only their formation and rupture but also for clinical evaluation and treatment. However, important hemodynamic quantities are difficult to measure in vivo. In the present study, an approximate model of normal middle cerebral artery (MCA) along with two cases consisting broad and narrow saccular aneurysms are analyzed. The models are generated in ANSYS WORKBENCH and transient analysis is performed in ANSYS-CFX. The results obtained are compared for three cases and agree well with the available literature.

Numerical Evaluation of the Aerodynamic Efficiency of the Stevens and Jolly Vertical- Axis Windmill (1895)

This paper presents a numerical investigation of the unsteady flow around an American 19th century vertical-axis windmill: the Stevens & Jolly rotor, patented on April 16, 1895. The computational approach used is based on solving the complete transient Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (t-RANS) equations: a full campaign of numerical simulation has been performed using the k-ω SST turbulence model. Flow field characteristics have been investigated for several values of tip speed ratio and for a constant unperturbed free-stream wind velocity of 6 m/s, enabling the study of some unsteady flow phenomena in the rotor wake. Finally, the global power generated from the windmill has been determined for each simulated angular velocity, allowing the calculation of the rotor power-curve.

A Novel Slip Correction Factor for Spherical Aerosol Particles

A 3D simulation study for an incompressible slip flow around a spherical aerosol particle was performed. The full Navier-Stokes equations were solved and the velocity jump at the gas-particle interface was treated numerically by imposition of the slip boundary condition. Analytical solution to the Stokesian slip flow past a spherical particle was used as a benchmark for code verification, and excellent agreement was achieved. The Simulation results showed that in addition to the Knudsen number, the Reynolds number affects the slip correction factor. Thus, the Cunningham-based slip corrections must be augmented by the inclusion of the effect of Reynolds number for application to Lagrangian tracking of fine particles. A new expression for the slip correction factor as a function of both Knudsen number and Reynolds number was developed.

A Study on Characteristics and Geometric Parameters of the Flat Porous Aerostatic Bearing

A CFD software was employed to analyze the characteristics of the flat round porous aerostatic bearings. The effects of gap between the bearing and the guide way and the porosity of the porous material on the load capacity of the bearing were studied. The adequacy of the simulation model and the approach was verified. From the parametric study, it is found that the depth of the flow path does not influence the load capacity of the bearing; the load capacity of the bearing will decrease if the thickness of the porous material increases or the porous material protrudes above the bearing housing; the variation of the chamfer at the edge of the bearing does not affect the bearing load capacity. For a bearing with an air gap of 5μm and a porosity of 0.1, the average load capacity and the pressure distribution of the bearing are nearly unchanged no matter the bearing moves at a constant or a varying speed.

Highly Scalable, Reversible and Embedded Image Compression System

A new method for low complexity image coding is presented, that permits different settings and great scalability in the generation of the final bit stream. This coding presents a continuoustone still image compression system that groups loss and lossless compression making use of finite arithmetic reversible transforms. Both transformation in the space of color and wavelet transformation are reversible. The transformed coefficients are coded by means of a coding system in depending on a subdivision into smaller components (CFDS) similar to the bit importance codification. The subcomponents so obtained are reordered by means of a highly configure alignment system depending on the application that makes possible the re-configure of the elements of the image and obtaining different levels of importance from which the bit stream will be generated. The subcomponents of each level of importance are coded using a variable length entropy coding system (VBLm) that permits the generation of an embedded bit stream. This bit stream supposes itself a bit stream that codes a compressed still image. However, the use of a packing system on the bit stream after the VBLm allows the realization of a final highly scalable bit stream from a basic image level and one or several enhance levels.

Numerical and Experimental Investigations on Jet Impingement Cooling

Effective cooling of electronic equipment has emerged as a challenging and constraining problem of the new century. In the present work the feasibility and effectiveness of jet impingement cooling on electronics were investigated numerically and experimentally. Studies have been conducted to see the effect of the geometrical parameters such as jet diameter (D), jet to target spacing (Z) and ratio of jet spacing to jet diameter (Z/D) on the heat transfer characteristics. The values of Reynolds numbers considered are in the range 7000 to 42000. The results obtained from the numerical studies are validated by conducting experiments. From the studies it is found that the optimum value of Z/D ratio is 5. For a given Reynolds number, the Nusselt number increases by about 28% if the diameter of the nozzle is increased from 1mm to 2mm. Correlations are proposed for Nusselt number in terms of Reynolds number and these are valid for air as the cooling medium.

Numerical Simulation of the Effects of Nanofluid on a Heat Pipe Thermal Performance

This research aims at modeling and simulating the effects of nanofluids on cylindrical heat pipes thermal performance using the ANSYS-FLUENT CFD commercial software. The heat pipe outer wall temperature distribution, thermal resistance, liquid pressure and axial velocity in presence of suspended nano-scaled solid particle (i.e. Cu, Al2O3 and TiO2) within the fluid (water) were investigated. The effect of particle concentration and size were explored and it is concluded that the thermal performance of the heat pipe is improved when using nanofluid as the system working fluid. Additionally, it was observed that the thermal resistance of the heat pipe drops as the particle concentration level increases and particle radius decreases.

Optimization of GAMM Francis Turbine Runner

Nowadays, the challenge in hydraulic turbine design is the multi-objective design of turbine runner to reach higher efficiency. The hydraulic performance of a turbine is strictly depends on runner blades shape. The present paper focuses on the application of the multi-objective optimization algorithm to the design of a small Francis turbine runner. The optimization exercise focuses on the efficiency improvement at the best efficiency operating point (BEP) of the GAMM Francis turbine. A global optimization method based on artificial neural networks (ANN) and genetic algorithms (GA) coupled by 3D Navier-Stokes flow solver has been used to improve the performance of an initial geometry of a Francis runner. The results show the good ability of optimization algorithm and the final geometry has better efficiency with initial geometry. The goal was to optimize the geometry of the blades of GAMM turbine runner which leads to maximum total efficiency by changing the design parameters of camber line in at least 5 sections of a blade. The efficiency of the optimized geometry is improved from 90.7% to 92.5%. Finally, design parameters and the way of selection have been considered and discussed.

Aerodynamics and Optimization of Airfoil Under Ground Effect

The Prediction of aerodynamic characteristics and shape optimization of airfoil under the ground effect have been carried out by integration of computational fluid dynamics and the multiobjective Pareto-based genetic algorithm. The main flow characteristics around an airfoil of WIG craft are lift force, lift-to-drag ratio and static height stability (H.S). However, they show a strong trade-off phenomenon so that it is not easy to satisfy the design requirements simultaneously. This difficulty can be resolved by the optimal design. The above mentioned three characteristics are chosen as the objective functions and NACA0015 airfoil is considered as a baseline model in the present study. The profile of airfoil is constructed by Bezier curves with fourteen control points and these control points are adopted as the design variables. For multi-objective optimization problems, the optimal solutions are not unique but a set of non-dominated optima and they are called Pareto frontiers or Pareto sets. As the results of optimization, forty numbers of non- dominated Pareto optima can be obtained at thirty evolutions.