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Prediction of Turbulent Swirling Flow in a Combustor Model
(*) Corresponding author
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15866/irease.v9i2.9562
Abstract
Swirl flow is a very important type of turbulent flow that is widely used in industrial and aerospace applications. Additionally, swirl flows enable better air-fuel mixing during combustion which will reduce harmful emissions. Therefore, it is important to be able to predict the behavior of such a flow to better implement it in a combustor’s design. Consequently, this study aims at utilizing a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software ANSYS CFX v14 to numerically simulate an isothermal swirling turbulent flow in a combustor model. The fluid studied was air at 25ºC, and the swirling effect was created using a 0.5 constant angle swirler. Three different turbulence models (k-ε, k-ω and SST “Shear Stress Transport”) were investigated in the simulations and their results were compared with the experimental data available in the open literature. The primary objective is to find which turbulence model best predicts the actual flow behavior. It was concluded that the k-ω turbulence model performs better than the other used models in predicting the current experimental results. However, it was also concluded that the k-ε model exhibits relatively close behavior to the k-ω model and the differences are insignificant.
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References
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