Abstract
The laminar steady flow downstream of fine-mesh screens is studied. Instead of woven-wire screens, high-uniformity screens are fabricated by photoetching holes into 50.8 μm thick Inconel sheets. The resulting screens have minimum wire widths of 50.8 μm and inter-wire separations of 254 μm and 318 μm for the two screens examined. A flow facility has been constructed for experiments with these screens. Air is passed through the screens at upstream velocities yielding wire width Reynolds numbers from 2 to 35. To determine the drag coefficient, pressure drops across the screens are measured using pressure transducers and manometers. Threedimensional flow simulations are also performed. The computational drag coefficients consistently overpredict the experimental values. However, the computational results exhibit sensitivity to the assumed wire cross section, indicating that detailed knowledge of the wire cross section is essential for unambiguous interpretation of experiments using photoetched screens. Standard semi-empirical drag correlations for woven-wire screens do not predict the present experimental results with consistent accuracy.
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Abbreviations
- A 1, A 2 :
-
screen aspect ratios
- c d :
-
screen drag coefficient
- d :
-
woven-wire diameter
- D :
-
photoetched minimum wire width (spanwise)
- f :
-
woven-wire screen drag function
- M :
-
distance between adjacent wires
- N :
-
spectral-element order
- o :
-
woven-wire open area fraction
- O :
-
photoetched open area fraction
- Δ p :
-
pressure drop across screen
- Re d :
-
woven-wire diameter Reynolds number
- Re D :
-
photoetched wire width Reynolds number
- U :
-
fluid velocity upstream of screen
- W :
-
photoetched sheet thickness (streamwise)
- x, y, z :
-
spatial coordinates
- ϱ :
-
fluid density
- μ :
-
fluid viscosity
References
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O'Hern, T.J., Torczynski, J.R. Reynolds number dependence of the drag coefficient for laminar flow through fine-scale photoetched screens. Experiments in Fluids 15, 75–81 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00195599
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00195599