Performance study of spot cooling of tractor cabinet

Abstract

Abstract The target of this research is to study theoretically and experimentally the performance of spot cooling of a tractor cabinet including a single internal heat source (tested body) by using vortex tube. In the theoretical study, the cabinet is cooled from the roof by one port while the lower and side walls temperature is kept constant. The effect of inlet and outlet air ports positions in the cabinet is considered. Moreover, we study the influence of varying some parameters as velocity and temperature of inlet cold air to the cabinet, the pressure of inlet air to the vortex tube and the cold fraction of the vortex tube in the presence of a heat source with a constant heat flux of 120 W/m2. In this work, FLUENT 6.3.26 package is used in the numerical study. The steady of the 2-D incompressible viscous flow problem is solved by using the fluent package. Various spot cooling geometries are applied. Specific conditions for each case are defined, and the computational fluid dynamics is provided for three different groups containing twelve cases of local inlet and outlet ports. The calculations are performed for ventilation effectiveness factor (VEF) which is ranging from 0.58 to 1.29. The best position for the inlet locations in this study is found in upper right side of roof and the outlet locations in upper left side of cabinet. To validate the numerical model, an experimental test rig has been designed and constructed with the actual dimensions of a tractor cabinet. The experiments are carried out with the same conditions of the ideal case. The comparison of the experimental data, for that of best position of the inlet port, with the theoretical results gives a satisfactory agreement.