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In this paper, the effect of geometrical parameters of centrifugal fan on performance has been presented with a system approach. Often, the operators or the design engineers focus on the immediate requirements of the engine/equipment and they neglect the broader question of how the fan parameters are affecting the equipment. For instance, change in fan angles will change the performance e.g., airflow rates and efficiency. However, it also affects the contaminants build-up on the blades. Blade angle with higher angle of attack will promote contaminants build-up on blade surfaces, which in turn causes performance degradation and unstable operation. The system approach in fan parameter selection will result in a more reliable system. Significance of other fan parameters is also discussed. We present an experimental setup and validated computational fluid dynamic (CFD) model. Fan power consumption is determined experimentally and compared with the CFD model. Further parametric simulations were carried out to investigate the effect on fan performance. Effect of system resistance, inlet and outlet angle, blade thickness, and no-uniform spaced blades has been described with discussions on industrial relevance. A fan with higher flow rates is desirable to reduce engine temperatures and enhance the durability. However, higher flow rates result in more fan power consumption at a given fan speed. The test results suggest that a fan with higher power coefficient does not affect the vehicle's mileage significantly. This paper will help design engineers in making informed decision about the interaction between the fans and system, and its effect during the operation.
The ventricular assist device (VAD) assists the patients with heart diseases for limited and prolonged periods. This device synchronizes with normal heart activities to help foster its performance. Consequently, its sensitive design requires high accuracy. The pumps are the essential part of every VAD which should operate in wide ranges of flow and pressure. As there are various types of VAD under different designs, it is neither practical nor plausible to experimentally/clinically investigate their performances. Therefore, in the concurrent study, a numerical study was carried out on four different generation prototypes of VAD pumps for reaching an optimum design. Using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method, the software derived, showed and streamlined the flow field shear stress both inside the VAD and its blades. Furthermore, the vortices and flow rate-pressure curves were observed. The results showed that the curved blade pumps operate better compared to that of the straight blade types, concerning the provision of enough pressure and less damage to the red blood cells. The results have implications not only for comparing different types of VAD designs but also for understanding the resulted shear stresses and pressures as a result of the blade’s structure.
In this study, the flow structure and effect of different pump rotational speeds on a centrifugal pump’s performance are experimentally and numerically investigated. The internal flow field pattern within the pump has been analyzed and discussed using the CFD technique. The numerical results are compared with experimental data under a wide range of operating conditions. The comparison results between them have indicated a considerable agreement. The pressure variations are gradually increasing from inlet to outlet impeller of the pump. The results note that when the impeller rotates near the tongue region, the pressure in this region was higher than in other parts. Also, the interaction between the impeller and volute tongue region is actually according to the impeller blades’ relative position concerning the tongue region. Furthermore, the pressure and velocity variations within a centrifugal pump increase with rotational impeller speed.
Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is fast emerging as a practically useful computational simulation tool for a wide variety of engineering problems. SPH is also gaining popularity as the back bone for fast and realistic animations in graphics and video games. The Lagrangian and mesh-free nature of the method facilitates fast and accurate simulation of material deformation, interface capture, etc. Typically, particle-based methods would necessitate particle search and locate algorithms to be implemented efficiently, as continuous creation of neighbor particle lists is a computationally expensive step. Hence, it is advantageous to implement SPH, on modern multi-core platforms with the help of High-Performance Computing (HPC) tools. In this work, the computational performance of an SPH algorithm is assessed on multi-core Central Processing Unit (CPU) as well as massively parallel General Purpose Graphical Processing Units (GP-GPU). Parallelizing SPH faces several challenges such as, scalability of the neighbor search process, force calculations, minimizing thread divergence, achieving coalesced memory access patterns, balancing workload, ensuring optimum use of computational resources, etc. While addressing some of these challenges, detailed analysis of performance metrics such as speedup, global load efficiency, global store efficiency, warp execution efficiency, occupancy, etc. is evaluated. The OpenMP and Compute Unified Device Architecture(CUDA) parallel programming models have been used for parallel computing on Intel Xeon(R) E5-2630 multi-core CPU and NVIDIA Quadro M4000 and NVIDIA Tesla p100 massively parallel GPU architectures. Standard benchmark problems from the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) literature are chosen for the validation. The key concern of how to identify a suitable architecture for mesh-less methods which essentially require heavy workload of neighbor search and evaluation of local force fields from neighbor interactions is addressed.