Numerical Analysis of Centrifugal Air Blower

The turbo machine is an energy conversion device which converts mechanical energy to kinetic/pressure energy or vice versa. The conversion is done through the dynamic interaction between a continuously flowing fluid and rotating machine component. Turbo machines comprise various types of fans, blowers, compressors, pumps, turbines etc. More and more experimental research work is available in the field of turbo machine design and its evaluation. Literature review has revealed that a few literatures are available on three dimensional numerical analysis of a centrifugal fan/blower. Literature review in present work is highly focused on centrifugal blower and use of CFD techniques in turbo machines. In this course of work, input parameters and design parameters of centrifugal blower is obtained as per church and Osborne design methodology developed by Kinnari Shah, PROF. NitinVibhakar. Fluid model is made as per this design data in PRO-E SOFTWARE. And this fluid model is simulated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach in ANSYS (CFX). Numerical analysis carried out in this work is to understand the flow characteristics at design and off-design conditions under varying mass flow rates, varying rotational speeds and number of blades in both design methodology. This numerical analysis is under consideration of steady flow and for rotational domain (frozen rotor interference) is used. Performance curves are obtained under different variable inlet parameters like volume flow rate, rotational speed and number of impeller blades. Here mass flow rate as a inlet boundary condition and static pressure as a outlet boundary condition. Volume flow rate is changed by changing the mass flow rate at inlet. Overall work carried out on flow behaviour and performance graphs for different cases are discussed in length in results and discussions chapter. Comparative evaluation of two design method indicates that error in static pressure gradient is higher in Osborne design rather than church design, and performance parameters are better for church design than the Osborne design.