NUMERICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES OF A CROSS-FLOW FAN FOR PERFORMANCE ESTIMATION

The cross-flow fan consists of forward curved blades located inside the casing including a stabilizer (vortex wall) and a volute (rear wall). In the present study, the Navier-Stokes equations for a two-dimensional unsteady flow inside the cross-flow fan are numerically simulated using commercial CFD code and open source code. The standard k-epsilon turbulence model was used in the simulations. The sliding mesh method was applied to consider the rotating blades. The 2-D unsteady flow fields are analyzed with the ANSYS CFX solver and OpenFOAM pimpleDyMNFoam solver which is developed by NEXTFoam corporation. To verify the simulation performance, we compared the measured data with wind tunnel experiments such as static pressure, shaft torque, and fan efficiency for various flow rates.