Abstract
There have been several attempts to optimise fluid flow manifolds; these, however, have shown are limited and further investigation into the efficiency of these systems is needed. This work focuses on improving the distribution manifolds efficacy in outflow division, i.e. attaining the same flow rate per each exit port of the manifold. Water has been selected to be the working fluid. A numerical investigation utilising CFD (by ANSYS Fluent R16.2) analysis into two-dimensional, incompressible, and turbulent flow has been carried out to resolve the flow manifold problem using two turbulence modelling, Standard k-ε and RNG k-ε, approaches. Four values of flow rate have been considered, which are specified by the Reynolds numbers 101×103, 202×103, 303×103, and 404×103. These values correspond to the fluid inlet velocities 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 m/s, respectively. The manifold configuration is defined by the given area ratio (total cross-sectional area for laterals /header cross-sectional area). Three values of area ratio are considered; these are 0.703125, 0.84375, and 0.984375. The results indicate that the flow uniformity has a reverse proportional relationship with the fluid flow rate and area ratio for all manifold arrangements. However, there is no significant effect of the flow rate increase on flow mal-distribution. Also, the use of RNG k-ε model has shown higher values of the non-uniformity coefficient than those obtained by the Standard k-ε model. The outcomes of this analysis have been compared with experimental data and a good agreement among them has been found.
Highlights
Among all fluid-flow devices, manifolds are the most commonly encountered in practice, aside from valves, fittings, and pipes
A remarkable noticing can be found from the prior discussed figures, that is, for a specific value of outlet number and area ratio the values of β are almost identical with all Reynolds numbers and for both the turbulence solution models, this what makes us able to decide that the variations in flow rate have no considerable effect on the flow ratio
From the previous discussions to the results in section five, we can deduce that the uniformity of fluid per-port outflow is affected by the inlet flow rate and it indicates a reverse relation, but the variations in fluid flow rate do not lead to a significant increase in the non-uniformity flow coefficient
Summary
Among all fluid-flow devices, manifolds are the most commonly encountered in practice, aside from valves, fittings, and pipes. Manifolds occupy major importance in numerous engineering applications including old conventional applications and modern sophisticated equipment. A manifold is a chamber consisting of one fluid inlet and numerous fluid exits or, a chamber with many fluid inlets and a single fluid outlet. The former type may be designated as a distribution manifold while the latter is termed a collection manifold. Among all of the major design problems of fluid flow, the manifold problem still remains a primary one requiring a systematic solution method. The history of solution methods that have been employed for the manifold problem is closely related to the availability and power of computational tools. In order to enable such methods to be used as a design tool, it was necessary to make rather sweeping assumptions about the kind of the fluid flow style
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