| Summary: | T he casing treatment technique for the axial fan has never been more significant
since its potential applications were recognized in gas turbines, tunnel ventilation
and many other industrial applications where the axial fan would benefit from the
casing treatment. In the last two decades experimental investigations were carried
out at Cranfield University to examine the influence of recess casing treatment on
stall margin, operating efficiency and flow field of a low-speed axial flow fan. They
showed more than 50% improvement in the stall margin with a negligible loss in the
efficiency. However, a little work has been done on the numerical simulation of casing
treatments due to its complexities, even though in recent years computational fluid
dynamics [CFD] analysis has been very active in the prediction of various phenomena
in turbomachinery.
This work presents numerical investigation of flow in a single axial-flow fan with
and without recess casing treatment. It involves the detailed effect of the recess
casing on stall margin improvement as well as its influence on global performance
parameters. The project offers a contribution to the understanding of the physical
processes occurring when approaching stall and the working mechanism by which
recess casing treatments improve stall margin. A Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes
CFD code was used for the analysis using steady and unsteady simulations. The
numerical investigation of the overall performance, efficiency and work-input characteristics
of the fan were found to agree very well with the previously reported
experimental results.
The effect of casing treatment was investigated using two types of configurations,
vaneless and vaned casing. The vaneless casing treatment produced a sizeable stall
margin improvement with a measurable loss in both pressure rise and efficiency. The
recess was fitted later with vanes and was shown to offer both a further stall margin
improvement and an increase in the pressure rise coefficient without any significant
drop in efficiency at design conditions. The effect of number of vanes inside the
recess was also investigated by doubling and halving the number of vanes originally
adopted. The predicted results highlighted the importance of the vane inside the
casing. Unsteady simulations for the fan with solid and treated casing were carried out.
The solid casing simulated for a single blade passage as well as for the entire fan
containing all 27 blades highlighted the flow physics of the tip stall growth process,
as a large amount of radial flow injected from the hub at the blade suction side near
the trailing edge towards the outer casing and occupy this through a mechanism of
radial low momentum flow transport. This transport process is the main contributor
to the very large separation observed in the shroud region in addition to the locally
induced separation due to high blade loading and tip clearance. Although the examination
of the unsteady simulation of the recess treatment cavities does not offer
an image of large scale unsteady activity at the flow condition investigated, this
is on itself quite significant and enables the drawing of an important conclusion
namely that large casing treatments rely primarily on a steady-state flow process.
The corollary of this conclusion is of course that a steady-state simulation should
then be sufficient to capture the essential features of the recess treatment.
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