Computational fluid dynamics of hot and cold air flow inside short and long mixing tees

Abstract

AbstractIn this paper, the numerical simulation was done for a cylindrical tee by establishing a steady-state simulation to examine the mixing performance. The temperature of the fluid at the hot inlet was chosen as 36 °C and 19 °C for the cold inlet. The numerical simulation was done for a short tee of 192 mm and a long mixing tee of 262 mm at a variety of momentum ratios. The geometry was meshed in FLUENT before solving the domain. For the meshing, the faces were initially named hot inlet, cold inlet, outlet, and walls. The triangular method was chosen to generate a mesh for the flow domain. The size of the cell in meshing was taken as 0.1 m. In this work, the SST k–ω models were selected to perform the computations. The analytical values of temperature were used to validate the numerical results. Results show that the thermal mixing was done effectively using the CFD ANSYS software package. Results show that the size of the mixing area is the same hence there is not much of a difference between the long tee and the short tee in that particular sector. The thermal mixing was found better when the velocity at the vertical inlet (y-axis) becomes greater and the average temperature is lower. Also, the increase in the pipe's length causes the average temperature to drop since the fluid mixes better the farther along it travels, while also slightly increasing the velocity.