Parametric study on flow dispersion of water sprinkle

Abstract

Although water sprinkler is used extensively in agriculture, little effort had been made to improve its performance, resulting in many sprinkler head available at market having less optimum design. Thus, this study aims to improve the basic design of water sprinkler head by conducting a parametric study on the effect of model geometry due to different flow characteristics. A common type of water sprinkler is modelled with computer aided design software and various changes such as enlarging nozzle diameter from 4mm to 8mm, changing vane angle from 70 degrees to 45 degrees are made to the original model. The models were simulated with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software to investigate how the variation in geometry affects the flow of water and the performance of sprinkler head. The performance of water sprinkler is compared to original model in terms of watering distance, area of spray and velocity of water jet in air. The result of this study shows that enlarge the nozzle diameter have a positive effect on the velocity of water jet in air and the area covered by water jet but it drastically decreases the watering distance of sprinkler. Besides that, changing the angle of vane from 70 degrees to 45 degrees decrease the watering distance slightly and it concentrates the water into a fine jet that cover a small area. To reduce the effect, grooves can be added to the vane to increase the divergence of water spray. Reducing the angle of curvature from 10 degrees to 5 degrees improves the watering distance. The angle of curvature can be reduced more to increase the watering distance further.