Numerical simulation of an industrial centrifugal fan 5,5 kW with OpenFOAM

Abstract

Centrifugal fan is a mechanical device working on the principle of centrifugal pump. When working, propeller sucks air along the axis, the pressure at the fan center will be small. The air will move from high pressure region to where the pressure is low. In other words, the air will receive additional centrifugal forces. The appearance of centrifugal fan has brought us many benefits such as basement ventilation systems or where ventilation fans enable to be directly established. Hence, the study of the performance characteristics of centrifugal fan is currently a matter concern, from which the improvement of performance can be applied to the fan. In this paper, a model simulating the performance characteristics of centrifugal fan was done on snappyHexMesh ultility with mainly hexahedron girds. Therefore, the results of the performance characteristics of centrifugal fan use k – omega SST is compared with experimental data. The results obtained from automatic meshing snappyHexmesh ultility and the SimpleFoam solver of open source OpenFOAM software provide the reliable data in the design and calculation of centrifugal fan. On this basis, the cost of improving the performance of centrifugal fan can be reduced considerably by numerical simulation.