In this paper we want to present an unsteady simulation of a full rotor of an axial fan with low pressure and high flow rate, developed during the MinWaterCSP EU project, specifically designed and optimized for Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants with the aim of reducing water consumption at the condenser stage. An earlier version of the fan, referred as M-Fan, was initially developed to serve the hybrid cooling system, to boost the overall heat transfer performance with dry cooling. In this work, we will evaluate the performance of a redesigned and scaled version of the fan, referred as T-Fan, by performing a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis of the unsteady flow. The T-Fan was designed and optimized to reduce noise emissions and improve efficiency with respect to the M-Fan. We perform the simulation using a in-house built C++ parallel software for CFD analysis using Finite Elements (FE). We model the flow dynamics using the Residual Based Variational MultiScale method (RB-VMS) to obtain a stabilized solution of the Navier-Stokes equation using a Finite Elements (FE) discretization.

We will discuss the simulation results of the RB-VMS model by comparing our the RB-VMS simulation of the T-Fan with LES and experimental results on the same fan.


Unsteady Flow Simulation of an Axial Fan for Dry Cooling in a CSP Plant Using the Variational Multiscale Method

Division / Sponsor:
International Gas Turbine Institute (IGTI)

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/GT/GT2020/volume/84058

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