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Shape Optimization of Forward-Curved-Blade Centrifugal Fan With Navier-Stokes Analysis
Shape Optimization of Forward-Curved-Blade Centrifugal Fan With Navier-Stokes Analysis
Forward-Curved-Blade
Centrifugal Fan with
Kwang-Yong Kim1
Professor
Navier-Stokes Analysis
e-mail: kykim@inha.ac.kr
In this paper, the response surface method using a three-dimensional Navier-Stokes analy-
sis to optimize the shape of a forward-curved-blade centrifugal fan is described. For the
Seoung-Jin Seo numerical analysis, Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations with the standard k- ⑀
Graduate Student
turbulence model are discretized with finite volume approximations. The SIMPLEC algo-
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
rithm is used as a velocity–pressure correction procedure. In order to reduce the huge
Inha University,
computing time due to a large number of blades in forward-curved-blade centrifugal fan,
Incheon 402-751, Republic of Korea
the flow inside of the fan is regarded as steady flow by introducing the impeller force
models. Four design variables, i.e., location of cutoff, radius of cutoff, expansion angle of
scroll, and width of impeller, were selected to optimize the shapes of scroll and blades.
Data points for response evaluations were selected by D-optimal design, and a linear
programming method was used for the optimization on the response surface. As a main
result of the optimization, the efficiency was successfully improved. Effects of the relative
size of the inactive zone at the exit of impeller and momentum fluxes of the flow in scroll
on efficiency were further discussed. It was found that the optimization process provides a
reliable design of this kind of fan with reasonable computing time.
关DOI: 10.1115/1.1792256兴
Journal of Fluids Engineering Copyright © 2004 by ASME SEPTEMBER 2004, Vol. 126 Õ 735
冋冉 冊 册
r
p ui u j 2 uk
共 u i u j 兲 ⫽⫺ ⫹ ⫹ ⫺ ␦ ⫺ u i⬘ u ⬘j where ṁ, d, , , , , Ā, c, u, r, ⌬V, and im are the mass flow
x j xi x j x j xi 3 xk ij rate, diameter of impeller, angular velocity, blade angle, slip fac-
⫹s̄ iu , (2) tor, density, average flow area, flow velocity, blade speed, radial
coordinate, volume of cell, and efficiency of impeller, respec-
where u i and u i⬘ are mean and fluctuating velocities, respectively, tively, and subscripts 1 and 2 indicate the inlet and outlet of the
and s̄ iu is source term. Governing equations with standard k⫺ ⑀ blade, respectively. As shown in Fig. 2, the impeller block consists
turbulence model 关13兴 are transformed to non-orthogonal curvilin- of a number of computational cells. The body forces f c and f r in
ear coordinates, and are discretized with finite volume approxima- the above equations are calculated with the local velocities at inlet
tions. As a numerical scheme for the convection terms, a linear and outlet of blade: c 1u , c 1r , c 2u , and c 2r . Thus, the body forces
upwind differencing scheme is used, and for the diffusion terms, a are functions of both axial and circumferential coordinates. Then,
central differencing scheme is used. The strongly implicit proce- in the radial direction, the forces at specified axial and circumfer-
dure 共SIP兲 关14兴 was used to solve linear algebraic equations. Also ential locations are distributed as proportional to the cell volume,
the SIMPLEC algorithm is used to match pressure and velocities. and stored in the source terms of discretized momentum equations
Various boundary conditions have to be imposed for calcula- for each computational cell in the impeller block. Therefore,
tions of the forward-curved-blade centrifugal fan shown in Fig. 1. physical information concerning the blade forces included in the
In this work, since no experimental data are available for inlet cell is not uniform in the block and changes with iteration step.
velocities and turbulent quantities, uniform profiles are assumed at Thus, the nonaxisymmetric three-dimensional flow field in the
the inlet. At the exit boundary of each block, Neumann conditions impeller block can be calculated with these impeller models.
are used. A no-slip condition is adopted at the solid walls. Also, To stabilize the solutions, each component of the force is cal-
the implementation of wall boundary conditions in turbulent flows culated by blending the local force ( f local) with the averaged force
is completed by use of the empirical wall function to calculate the ( f av) with a weighting factor 共w兲, as follows:
mean velocity, turbulent kinetic energy, and dissipation rate in the
logarithmic wall layer. f c ⫽w c f av
c ⫹ 共 1⫺w c 兲 f c
local
, (5)
In the presented work, a multiblock system is employed for the f r ⫽w r f rav⫹ 共 1⫺w r 兲 f rlocal . (6)
grids. The whole computational domain is divided into three
av
blocks: core, impeller, and scroll. The grid points along the adja- The average force, f indicates the force averaged in circumfer-
cent block boundaries are coincident with each other, and there- ential direction and is calculated with the average velocities: c 1u
fore a simple overlapping coupling procedure can be applied to and c 1r at the inlet of impeller, and c 2u and c 2r at the outlet of
facilitate the transfer of aerodynamic information between blocks. impeller, which are obtained from the flow coefficient and the
In case of a multiblock system, pressure gradient affects the trans- velocity diagram. In the above models of impeller force, the slip
port of momentum at the interface between different blocks. factor and the efficiency must be prescribed. In this work, these
Therefore, the pressure gradients as well as the pressures must be values are obtained from the experimental results provided by
joined between different blocks. Kim and Kang 关2兴.
F⫽  0 ⫹ 兺  x ⫹兺 
j⫽1
j j
j⫽1
j jx j ⫹
2
兺兺
i⫽ j
i jx ix j , (7) peller is 1140 rpm, and the mass flow rate is 7.66 m3 /min. The
CPU time to obtain the converged solution for single-flow analy-
where n is the number of design variables, and the number of sis is about 2 h with a 2-GHz Pentium-IV processor.
regression coefficients (  o ,  l , etc.兲 is n t ⫽(n⫹1)(n⫹2)/2. To The results with the impeller force models 关Eqs. 共3兲 and 共4兲兴
determine the coefficients, standard least-squares regression can were validated in comparison with the measurements of Kim and
be used. In this case, the number of data must be larger than the Kang 关2兴 in the previous work 关5兴. For example, in Fig. 4, axial
number of coefficients. distributions of radial velocity component at the exit of impeller
In order to reduce the number of data needed for constructing 共⫽270°兲 for three different flow coefficients, are compared with
response surface and to improve the representation of the design the measurements 关2兴. In case of higher flow rates, ⫽2.4 and 4.0,
space, the design of experiment 共DOE兲 is important for selecting negative velocities occur near the front plate. Except in this region
design points. Among the different types of DOE techniques, of reverse flow, the computational profile for ⫽4.0 shows rea-
D-optimal design 关16兴 is employed in this work for the represen- sonably good agreement with experiment, while for the lower
tation of design space. With the number of design points only flow coefficients the magnitudes of this velocity component are
1.5–2.5 times the number of coefficients in the response model, slightly overpredicted. In this work, the clearance between impel-
reliable results can be obtained 关17兴. Guinta 关18兴 showed that this ler and casing is not considered in the analyses, and thus the
technique constructs the response surface with sufficient reliabil- leakage flow through the clearance and associated losses are ig-
ity in case with five design variables. nored. Therefore, the computational errors are partly attributed to
To estimate the significance of any individual in the quadratic
polynomial coefficient, analysis of variance 共ANOVA兲 and regres-
sion analysis yield a measure of the uncertainty in the coefficients
to increase the efficiency of the response surface. This uncertainty
estimation is provided by using the t statistic 关19兴. The reciprocal
of the t statistic is an estimate of the standard deviation of each
coefficient as a fraction of its value. Accordingly, coefficients with
low values for the t statistic are not accurately estimated. This test
forms the basis for model optimization by adding or deleting co-
efficients. A common statistical measure of significance of a re-
sponse surface model is the adjusted R 2 value, R adj 2
关19兴. The
2
maximum value for R adj is 1.0, which occurs when all of the
variation in the observed response values is described by the
trends of the response surface polynomial model.
3.2 Objective Function and Design Variables. The fol-
lowing objective function is minimized in the optimization
process:
F⫽1⫺ . (8)
Table 2 Ranges of design variables for selection of the points for response evaluation
Table 3 Quality of the second-order response surface for the objective function
Table 5 Quality of the second-order response surface for the fan static pressure
Model R2 2
R adj Std. error of the estimate
C M t⫽
1
Vol 冕 C M t dVol, and C M s⫽
1
Vol 冕 C M s dVol,
where the integrations are performed for the scroll volume 共Vol兲
in the range from ⫽90° to 360°. Circumferential variations of
dimensionless momentum fluxes are shown in Figs. 9共a兲 and 9共b兲.
Figures 10共a兲 and 10共b兲 are plots of efficiency versus averaged
momentum fluxes. It is found in these figures that, although both
momentum fluxes in the scroll are correlated with the efficiency,
Fig. 7 Inactive zones at the exit of impeller for reference and Fig. 9 Circumferential variations of momentum fluxes in
first optimum shapes scroll: „a… C Mt , „b… C Ms
Nomenclature
A ⫽ Flow area
b ⫽ Width of impeller
c r , c u ⫽ Radial and tangential components of flow ve-
locity, respectively
C M s , C M t ⫽ Dimensionless momentum fluxes in scroll
d ⫽ Diameter of impeller
F ⫽ Response function or objective function
f ⫽ Blade force
ṁ ⫽ Mass flow rate
n ⫽ Number of regression coefficients
Fig. 10 Correlations between efficiency and averaged momen-
P t , P s ⫽ Total and static pressures, respectively
tum fluxes in the scroll: „a… C Mt , „b… C Ms
r 2 , r 3 ⫽ Radii of impeller exit and scroll surface, re-
spectively
R c ⫽ Radius of cutoff
5 Conclusions u i ⫽ Cartesian velocity component
In order to maximize the efficiency, using location and radius of u ⫽ Blade speed
the cutoff, the expansion angle of the scroll and width of impeller w ⫽ Weighting factor
as design variables, the response surface optimization method V ⫽ Flow velocity
with three-dimensional Navier-Stokes analysis was successfully x i ⫽ Cartesian coordinate or design variable
applied to the aerodynamic design of forward-curved-blade cen- X, X b ⫽ Axial coordinate and width of impeller, respec-
trifugal fan. Navier-Stokes analysis using a mathematical model tively
of impeller forces is very effective to reduce computing time. ␣ ⫽ Expansion angle of scroll
 ⫽ Blade angle
 i ⫽ Coefficient of response polynomial
␦ i j ⫽ Kronecker delta
⫽ Slip factor
⫽ Flow coefficient
, s ⫽ Total and static efficiencies, respectively
im ⫽ Efficiency of impeller
c ⫽ Location of cutoff
⫽ Fluid density
⫽ Angular velocity
Subscripts
1, 2 ⫽ Inlet and outlet of blade, respectively
a, c, r ⫽ Axial, circumferential, and radial directions, respec-
tively
in, ex ⫽ Inlet and exit of the fan
Diacritic
Overbar ⫽ Average value
References
关1兴 Kind, R. J., and Tobin, M. G., 1990, ‘‘Flow in a Centrifugal Fan of the
Squirrel-Cage Type,’’ ASME J. Turbomach., 112, pp. 84 –90.
关2兴 Kim, J. K., and Kang, S. H., 1997, ‘‘Effects of the Scroll on the Flow Field of
a Sirocco Fan,’’ ISROMAC-7, Hawaii, pp. 1318 –1327.
关3兴 Kadota, S., Kawaguchi, K., Suzuki, M., Matsui, K., and Kikuyama, K., 1994,
‘‘Experimental Study on Low-Noise Multiblade Fan’’ 共First Report, Visualiza-
tion of Three-Dinensional Flow Between Blades兲, JSME Int. J., Ser. B, 60, pp.
102–113.
关4兴 Guo, E. M., and Kim, K. Y., 2004, ‘‘Three-Dimensional Flow Analysis and
Improvement of Slip Factor Model for Forward-Curved Blades Centrifugal
Fig. 11 Correlations between static efficiency and averaged Fan,’’ KSME Int. J., 18, pp. 302–312.
momentum fluxes in the scroll: „a… C Mt , „b… C Ms 关5兴 Seo, S. J., Kim, K. Y., and Kang, S. H., 2003, ‘‘Calculations of Three-