Abstract
This paper presents a comparison between the experimental and numerical simulations of turbulent swirling flow induced by twisted tape in vertical pipe. A novel measurement technique, phased array ultrasonic velocity profiler (UVP), has been developed for 2D velocity field visualization in swirling flow. A phased array with basic frequency 4 MHz has been designed, it has eight piezoelectric elements and each element transmits ultrasound beam. The advantage of this sensor is that the ultrasound beam can be controlled easily by changing the time delay of signal transmission for each element. A vector reconstruction algorithm is presented showing how the velocity vector of particles can be calculated from Doppler-shift frequencies taken from the output signals of two receiver elements. Two-dimensional velocity field has been visualized and it is found, as expected, that the presence of swirl cause a significant increase in the magnitude of the measured tangential velocity. Furthermore, a numerical calculation is performed and qualitatively compared with experimental results. The numerical result is obtained by solving three-dimensional, Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations by the commercial CFD code FLUENT® v.14.5 with RNG k-ε turbulence model. The qualitative comparison between phased array UVP and CFD results shows good agreement with the average velocity field. Experimental and numerical findings and parametric trends based on the effects of swirling flow are summarized and discussed.
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Hamdani, A., Ihara, T. & Kikura, H. Experimental and numerical visualizations of swirling flow in a vertical pipe. J Vis 19, 369–382 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12650-015-0340-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12650-015-0340-8