Effect of sand Erosion on Axial Flow Fan Using CFD

Abstract

This research aims to study and analyze the phenomena of sand erosion in an axial flow fans using numerical simulation and discrete phase model techniques. In this work, discrete phase model technique has been used to determine the magnitude and location of erosion which occur inside axial flow fan consists of nine rotor blades and twelve stator blades. A computational fluid dynamics has been selected for the simulation of flow field inside the axial flow fan and for the simulation of the sand particle trajectories and their impact on the different walls. This numerical simulation techniques based on solving Favre-Averaged Navier-Stokes equation coupled with turbulence model and erosion equations. Detailed analysis of the erosion phenomena has been presented. This detailed analysis consists of representation of the following parameters: tangential velocity, static pressure, sand concentration and erosion rate for different sand particles size at different planes and at different rotation speeds. It has been found that an existence of large sand erosion at rotor pressure side for all different sand particles size. Also it has been observed that an absence of sand erosion at rotor suction side and at stator blades. This observation agreed with that observed by Balan&Tabakoff [7] and Masaya Suzuki [21] . This code has been validated by comparing it’s results with that available results in literature and it has been found that this code has high ability to predict the existence of sand erosion inside the axial fan.