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CFD ANALYSIS TOWARDS OPTIMIZING THE PARAMETERS OF VORTEX TUBE

PREPARED BY
K.SARATHKUMAR E. Mail:sarathnirmala@gmail.com Second year mechanical KCG College of technology. Chennai Mobile no: 9786375113 P.IYAPPAN E. Mail: iyappan2k@gmail.com Second year mechanical PSNA college of Engg.Dindigul Mobile no: 9003882559

SUBMISSION FOR

RITZKAIZEN9
National level technical symposium Regency Institute of Tech., Pondicherry

ABSTRACT
In todays complex manufacturing processes, there is a need for efficient means of production which has led all manufacturing companies to run the machines continuously. Due to which there is failure in cutting tools may occur due to wear, improper handling of tools or due to thermal shocks. The cutting tool failure due to thermal shocks is because improper cooling. Other than that rust formation is an important thing to be considered. This happens because of the continuous contact of liquid coolant on the surface of cutting tools. Because of these reasons the tool gets failed. The industries are going for replacement of failed tools with new ones without analyzing the cause of failure and rectifying them. So to stop the failure of cutting tools due to thermal shocks and rust formation the quality of tools must be improved. On the contrary by providing vortex cooling system which makes the tool free from the above said failures. Temperature distribution across the axial direction of the vortex tube is being studied and has been proved that the sub zero temperatures are obtained for cooling. CFD techniques are used to simulate the phenomenon of flow pattern, thermal separation, and pressure gradient. vortex tube. In the present study CFD is used as a tool for obtaining optimal design of

INTRODUCTION:
In the increasingly globalised economy due to the mass production there is continuous running of machines which leads to the failure in cutting tools. These failures of cutting tool are due to improper handling of tools or due to thermal shocks. The cutting tool failure due to thermal shocks is because of improper cooling. Other than that rust formation is an important thing to be considered. This happens because of the continuous contact of liquid coolant on the surface of cutting tools. Because of these reasons the tool gets failed. So a vortex tube could be employed for cooling purposes.

VORTEX TUBE:
The Vortex Tube (VT) cooler is a device that generates cold and hot gas from compressed gas, as shown in Fig.2.1. It contains the following parts: one or more inlet nozzles, a vortex chamber, a cold-end orifice, a hot-end control valve and a tube. When high pressure gas (6 bars) is tangentially injected into the vortex chamber via the inlet nozzles, a swirling flow is created inside the vortex chamber. At the hot exhaust, the gas escapes with a higher temperature, while at the cold exhaust, the gas has a lower temperature Vortex Tube (RVT), Hilsch Vortex Tube (HVT) and Ranque compared to the inlet temperature. 2

IDENTIFICATION OF THE PROBLEM:

In the case of RHVT temperature of air at both cold and hot outlets are taken as the broad area of interest in this project. In such circumstances both the inlet pressure and dimensional parameters should be considered. Varying the pressure at inlet can be easily done with the aid of a pressure regulator. Optimization of dimensional parameters of RHVT would give better performance. A thorough study or recent literary reviews implies that, the critical parameters that affect the outlet temperatures are L/D ratio and cold end diameter. For lower values of L/D ratios the swirl intensity extends beyond the length of hot end exit of the tube. L/D ratio should be in a range such that the stagnation point is within the tube. So increase in the length of tube enhances the temperature separation up to the condition that stagnation point is within the length of tube. Also secondary circulation flow in vortex tube has its influence on temperature separation.

PROBLEM STATEMENT
Analysis of temperature distribution across three dimensional model of Ranque Hilsch Vortex Tube(RHVT) using Fluent 6.1 package with the help of Gambit preprocessor. The three dimensional model is shown in figure 3.1

ASSUMPTIONS
In order to analyze the problem, the following assumptions are made The temperature variation is three dimensional The material properties are constant(Isotropic) Room temperature is assumed to be maintained at 270C

BOUNDARY CONDITIONS
For the computational domain shown in fig 3.1, the boundary conditions are listed below

INLET NOZZLE Pressure, Pin =0.5422 MPa

COLD END Pressure, Pc =0.136 MPa

HOT END Hot gas fractio=20, 40, 50, 60, 80%

Temperature, Tin =300 K

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The thermal behavior of vortex tubes of various dimensions has been taken into consideration. They are grouped into three types based on the dimensions varied. The types of vortex tubes taken for analysis are

Type1 RHVT with cold outlet diameter Dc=6 mm, L/D ratio = 05 mm, L/D ratio = 10 mm, L/D ratio = 20 mm, L/D ratio = 25 mm Type2 RHVT with cold outlet diameter Dc=7 mm, L/D ratio = 05 mm, L/D ratio = 10

mm, L/D ratio = 20 mm, L/D ratio = 25 m Type3 RHVT with cold outlet diameter Dc=8 mm, L/D ratio = 05 mm, L/D ratio = 10 mm,

L/D ratio = 20 mm, L/D ratio = 25 mm

PARAMETERS STUDIED
The inlet pressure and the velocity of air entering the vortex chamber are kept constant and the dimensional parameters (Dc and L/D) are varied. Then three dimensional model of the vortex tube with optimum design has been investigated by varying hot (mh) and cold gas fractions (mc). By varying the hot gas fraction the temperature of outlet air both at hot and cold ends are noted. The performances of all the cases of vortex tubes based on CFD and thermal analysis made in the FLUENT 6.1 are to be presented in this chapter. The temperature of the air at the cold outlet for various dimensions of vortex tube is the area of interest in this project.

TEMPERATURE DISTRIBUTION ACROSS THE VORTEX TUBE Type I:

Initial CFD analysis has been carried out for RHVT of diameter D=12mm, cold end

diameter (Dc) =6mm for various L/D ratios. The L/D ratio is varied as 5, 10, 20 and 25mm. the compressed air from the nozzle enters the vortex generation chamber and gets expand. This is the case 4

where airflow patterns and the temperature distribution are to be analyzed. For each L/D ratio individual contour diagrams for static temperature has been obtained and the values are tabulated. The analysis shows that, for a RHVT of Dc =6mm the minimum cold end temperature of -17oCand a maximum hot end temperature of 76oCcan be obtained.

Type II :

Secondly CFD analysis has been carried out for RHVT of diameter The analysis shows that for a RHVT of Dc=7 mm the

D=12 mm, cold end diameter (Dc) =7 mm for various L/D ratios as in the previous case. minimum cold end temperature of 100C and a maximum hot end temperature of 850C can be obtained.

Type III: Finally CFD analysis has been carried out for RHVT of diameter D=12
mm, cold end diameter (Dc) =8 mm for various L/D ratios. The analysis shows that for a RHVT of Dc=8 mm the minimum cold end temperature of -70C and a maximum hot end temperature of 710Ccan be obtained.

RESULTS OBTAINED FOR THE VARIOUS TYPES OF Dc VALUES

L/D RATIO 5 10 15 20 TYPE1 7 -8 -17 -12 TYPE2 10 -2 -10 -5 TYPE3 12 5 -7 -5 TYPE1 59 65 76 74 TYPE2 62 74 85 79 TYPE3 60 66 71 68 COLD GAS TEMP(C) HOT GAS TEMP(C) TEMPERATURE DIFFERENCE(C) TYPE1 52 73 93 86 TYPE2 52 76 95 84 TYPE3 48 61 78 73

COMPARISION OF VORTEX TUBES

Here the results obtained from the CFD analysis are compared for all the three cases to choose the optimum design parameters for a 12 mm diameter vortex tube. The graph illustrate that in all the cases the L/D ratio of 20 has made the greater temperature difference over the other ratios. But among the three cold end diameter used, Dc=7 mm shows the higher difference in temperature. This is shown in the following figure

But the maximum hot gas temperature of 850C is attained by using Dc=7 mm as shown in the following figure. Therefore choosing Dc depends on the application. Here we use RHVT for the purpose of cooling cutting tool. So as far as our case is concerned Dc of 6mm and L/D of 20 are optimum.

VELOCITIES AND FLOW PATTERN

The core flow takes place at stagnation point at an axial distance from the inlet. The point at which the axial velocity goes negative is called stagnation point. The analysis shows that the forced and free vortex components up to the stagnation point. In this case the air entering the system never leaves the cold outlet directly. After reaching the stagnation point the temperature separation takes place and there it takes negative direction towards cold end.

EFFECTS OF HOT GAS FRACTION

Vortex tube performance varies when hot gas fraction has been varied. This has been proved in CFD with the help of FLUENT 6.1. For a specific RHVT of Dc=6 mm and L/D=20(optimized values from earlier analysis), an investigation has been carried out. Hot gas fractions have been varied as 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 and 80 percentages. gets lower. The static temperature contours obtained for a hot gas fraction of 40% proves that if the hot fraction increases, the cold gas temperature

CONCLUSION
From the CFD analysis conducted for vortex tubes of various dimensions, the minimum cold gas temperature achievable is -170C and is obtained for RHVT of cold end diameter of 6 mm and L/D ratio of 20. With this optimum design, a minimum cold gas temperature of -310C is obtained at 80% 6

hot gas fraction. This optimum design of vortex tube can be used for various industrial cooling applications.

REFERENCES

1. Fundamentals of Compressible Flow with Aircraft & Jet Propulsion - S.M.Yahya, New Age International Publishers. 2. Computational Fluid Dynamics-T.J. Chung, Cambridge university press.