The impact of an additional inlet point on the hot outlet side on the vortex tube productivity

Abstract

Based on numerical simulation, the production of cold and hot air on a modified countercurrent vortex tube is studied. A feature of the modification under study is an additional air inlet area along the axis of the pipe from the hot outlet side. An additional point of blowing air is designed to redistribute the gas flows at the cold and hot outlets. Computational experiments were performed in the OpenFOAM software package using the sonicFoam solver based on the k−ε turbulence model under the assumption of an ideal gas. The dependence of the flow rate and temperature at the cold and hot outlets for different lengths of the main channel of the vortex tube was studied. For all considered pipe lengths, finite-volume grids were prepared in which the rectangular shape of the cells was preferably observed and their excessive stretching was avoided. To speed up the simulations, MPI technology was used; spatial decomposition of the original mesh was performed by decomposePar utility into equal parts along the pipe. This approach allowed us to reduce the computation time by approximately 3.5 times when running on six processes. The results of parallel modeling were combined with the reconstructPar utility and further processed by a Python program written using the vtk library. Thus, average values of the main physical characteristics by time and space at the cold and hot outlets were obtained. Results are discussed that demonstrate the effect of the vortex tube length on temperature and air flow at the respective outputs. The behavior of its main characteristics, non-standard for a vortex tube, is shown, an assumption is made about the reason for this behavior: the collision of very fast flows makes instability. Preliminary conclusions are made about choosing the effective length of the vortex tube with an additional air inlet channel at which the ratio of air temperature at the hot and cold outlets is the largest.