A NEW APPROACH TO MODEL AXIAL FANS IN COMMERCIAL CFD TOOLS

摘要

Most commercial CFD tools use fan curves to represent a fan. However, the presence of a blockage near inlet or exhaust of a fan and a restricted airflow direction will alter the fan performance, and the use of the original fan curve may result in erroneous results in these cases. A new approach to model fans will be presented in this paper. Using conservation of mass, momentum and energy, and the velocity triangles, this model relates velocity and pressure at fan exhaust to the corresponding values at fan inlet as well as fan geometry, rotational speed and fan blade lift and drag coefficients.