Computational Fluid Dynamics Modeling and Thermal Analysis of Flow Measurement in a Ranque Hilsch Vortex Tube

Ranque - Hilsch Vortex Tube (RHVT) is a devise that generates the cold and hot air streams coetaneous with compressed air as a working fluid without any moving part. The Flow separation of hot and cold air mainly depends on factors viz., nozzle number, nozzle shape, length and diameter of vortex tube, control valve, inlet pressure, diaphragm hole size, mass flow rate etc.,. The mechanism behind the highly complex flow pattern can be explained with the help of computational Fluid dynamics modeling and the results of the Analysis is successfully explained in the present work. Among the various methods to analyze the flow measurements i.e., Artificial Neural Network (ANN), taguchi method, etc., Computational Fluid dynamics method is used in this paper. The vortex tube of various lengths and L/D ratio are considered for this analysis. The change in pressure and temperature of hot and cold end of the vortex tube is calculated and the efficiency and cooling capacity is tried to increase with these change in parameters. The cooling capacity of vortex can further be improved by changing other parameters.