Effect of Convergent Angle on Flow Characteristics of Y-Shaped Diffusers Using CFD

Abstract

Diffusing ducts are used in fluid flow systems, mainly in aeroplane engine inlets to decelerate the flow and to correspondingly increase the static pressure. The main problem in achieving a high pressure recovery is the flow separation which results in non-uniform distribution and excessive losses. The present work is aimed to study the flow characteristics in Y-shaped diffusing ducts. The Y-shaped diffuser has rectangular inlets and the outlet is circular with a certain settling length for the flow to be stabilized. The diffuser is modeled in CATIA V5 and further discretized using ICEMCFD12.1. Hexahedral mesh is generated for all diffuser cases, which have been used to capture the hydrodynamic boundary layers. ANSYS CFX 12.1 based on finite volume technique, using k-ε turbulence model is adopted for predicting the flow. The flow field through the 3-dimensional domain is captured by solving the appropriate governing equations namely, the continuity equation and the momentum equation. The convergence criterion is set to 10E-06 for mass and momentum. The whole investigation is done in two phases: in the first phase a commercial CFD code is validated for the results obtained for an S-shaped diffuser and in the second phase the same idea is then extended for the analysis of Y-shaped diffuser. The coefficient of static pressure, cross flow and axial flow velocity distributions are calculated based on the mass averaged quantities for the Y-shaped diffusers (30o and 40o).