Abstract
In present numerical research, the temperature separation in methane stream within a counter flow Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube was investigated. A complete three-dimensional geometry of the vortex tube was used to generate a high-density computational grid. A vortex tube with two tangential inlet nozzles, an axial cold stream outlet and a circumferential hot stream outlet was considered. Methane was used as a fluid along with Peng-Robinson cubic equation of state. Fluid properties like total temperature and total pressure were analyzed for a range of inlet mass flow rates and inlet total pressure values. Also the total pressure and total temperature distribution along the axial direction was investigated. The temperature separation effect is more significant for air then for methane at all investigated pressures. Created model can be used to design industrial vortex tubes for oil and gas industry where methane is a main product.
Highlights
Vortex tube is a device that has no moving parts and acts like a heating and cooling machine at the same time
The LES simulations were performed on the workstation equipped with 6-core Intel Core i7 990X 3.4 GHz processor, 3 TB HDD, 24 GB DDR3 memory
The model was tested for three levels of inlet mass flow rate Gi that correspond to three levels of inlet pressure Pi
Summary
Vortex tube is a device that has no moving parts and acts like a heating and cooling machine at the same time. Behera et al (2008) investigated flow behaviour and energy separation in Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube with pseudo 3D RNG- k-ε model and ideal gas law. Farouk et al (2009) simulated gas species and temperature separation in the counter-flow Ranque–Hilsch vortex tube using 2D LES model. Secchiaroli et al (2009) performed numerical simulation of turbulent flow in a Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube using 2D RNG- k-ε, RSM and LES models. As far as methane was not used previously, we compared CFD results with those for air In this investigation, a three-dimensional compressible turbulent real gas flow was under consideration. (4) where u, v, w – velocity components in Cartesian coordinates In this CFD model, we used Peng-Robinson equation of state that is usually used to describe hydrocarbon gases behavior (Whitson, Brulé, 2000).
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