RESEARCH ARTICLE


Assessment of the Performances of RANS Models for Simulating Swirling Flows in a Can-Combustor



K. Khademi Shamami, M. Birouk
Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3T 5V6, Canada

Article Information


Identifiers and Pagination:

Year: 2008
Volume: 1
First Page: 8
Last Page: 27
Publisher Id: TOAEJ-1-8
DOI: 10.2174/1874146000801010008

Article History:

Received Date: 18/12/2007
Revision Received Date: 31/01/2008
Acceptance Date: 14/02/2008
Electronic publication date: 19/3/2008
Collection year: 2008

© 2008 Shamami et al.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, The University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 5V6, Canada; E-mail: biroukm@cc.umanitoba.ca


Abstract

The paper presents an assessment of the performances of RANS turbulence models for simulating turbulent swirling can-combustor flows with different inlet swirl intensities (i.e. S=0.4 and S=0.81). The predictions compared against published experimental data reveal that the eddy-viscosity models can not show the central recirculation zone in the case of a weakly swirling flow. However, although they reveal the existence of this region in a strongly swirling flow, they are incapable of predicting its correct size. On the other hand, the Reynolds stress models are able to predict the corner and the central recirculation zones in both flow cases. The predictions of turbulence intensities by using the realizable k-ω and the SST k-ω are comparable to those of the Reynolds stress closures. The shear stresses are not well predicted by all the tested models. Both the eddy-viscosity and the Reynolds stress closures show relatively less approximation errors in the weakly swirling flow.