Improved Aerodynamics of a Hollow-Blade Axial Flow Fan by Controlling the Leakage Flow Rate by Air Injection at the Rotating Shroud

Axial flow fans are used in many fields in order to ensure the mass and heat transfer from air, chiefly in the heating, ventilation and air conditioning industry (HVAC). A more proper understanding of the airflow behavior through the systems is necessary to manage and optimize the fan operation. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) represents a real tool providing the ability to access flow structures in areas that measuring equipment cannot reach. Reducing the leakage flow rate, inherent in operation, by synthetic-jet techniques improves performance. This paper presents the CFD results performed on a hollow blade fan developed by our team. The leakage flow is controlled by blowing air from 16 designated circular holes and arranged on the fan shroud. We discuss the results for two rotational speeds (1000 and 2000 rpm) and two injection rates (400 and 800 L/min). The numerical results consistent with the experimental show, for the low rotation speed and high injection ratio, significant gains in power (53%), torque (80%) and leakage flow rate (80%).     

A Carleman estimate for the two dimensional heat equation with mixed boundary conditions

It is well known that in a regular domain, the solutions of the Laplace equation with mixed boundary conditions can present a singular part. In this work, we prove a Carleman estimate for the two dimensional domain heat equation in presence of these singularities.     

Maghnite: novel inorganic reinforcement for single-step synthesis of PDMS nanocomposites with improved thermal,mechanical and textural properties

Research on Chemical Intermediates - A simple and efficient strategy was discussed for the synthesis of polydimethylsiloxane nanocomposites, based on the in situ sonochemical polymerization of...     

Green strategy for the synthesis of polyurethane by a heterogeneous catalyst based on activated clay

Research on Chemical Intermediates - A green synthetic route is proposed to obtain polyurethane with a controlled structure, by using maghnite-H+ as an environmentally friendly heterogeneous...     

Energetics of phase transformations in polyethylene

The molecular mechanisms involved in the orthorhombic-to-monoclinic phase transformation in polyethylene were investigated by the computer simulation of a structure–energy map based on empirically justified intermolecular potential functions. Stable packing structures for the orthorhombic and monoclinic form were isolated as relative minima, cohesive energies were determined from the energy minima, specific chain motions involved in the transformation were identified by the minimum energy path connecting the packing minima, and the activation energy for the transformation was determined from the energy barrier along the minimum energy transformation path. The packing structure parameters predicted from the energy map were in excellent agreement with unit cell dimensions observed near 0°K. The activation energy predicted for the transformation is relatively low (～0.5 kcal/mole of ethylene at 0°K and 0.25 kcal/mole of ethylene near the melting point, 411°K). Monoclinic packing was predicted to be slightly more stable than orthorhombic. Since this result is inconsistent with a large body of observations, we propose that the intramolecular energy of chain folds plays a dominant role in establishing chain-packing geometry. The inclusion of fold-transition energetics could give rise to transformation mechanisms which differ in details from those proposed in this work.     

Comparative investigation of operational performance characteristics of axially grooved and arterial heat pipes

The thermal performance characteristics of an axially grooved heat pipe (AGHP) and an arterial heat pipe (ArHP) sharing a similar external configuration are investigated. A mathematical model is developed to predict the capillary heat transfer limit for both heat pipes. The meniscus attachment point, contact angle and liquid–vapor interfacial shear stress are taken into account in this model. In particular, for predicting the ArHP dry-out, a novel model is proposed by introducing two different failure mechanisms. The results of the mathematical model are experimentally verified.     

A covariance fitting approach for correlated acoustic source mapping

Microphone arrays are commonly used for noise source localization and power estimation in aeroacoustic measurements. The delay-and-sum (DAS) beamformer, which is the most widely used beamforming algorithm in practice, suffers from low resolution and high sidelobe level problems. Therefore, deconvolution approaches, such as the deconvolution approach for the mapping of acoustic sources (DAMAS), are often used for extracting the actual source powers from the contaminated DAS results. However, most deconvolution approaches assume that the sources are uncorrelated. Although deconvolution algorithms that can deal with correlated sources, such as DAMAS for correlated sources, do exist, these algorithms are computationally impractical even for small scanning grid sizes. This paper presents a covariance fitting approach for the mapping of acoustic correlated sources (MACS), which can work with uncorrelated, partially correlated or even coherent sources with a reasonably low computational complexity. MACS minimizes a quadratic cost function in a cyclic manner by making use of convex optimization and sparsity, and is guaranteed to converge at least locally. Simulations and experimental data acquired at the University of Florida Aeroacoustic Flow Facility with a 63-element logarithmic spiral microphone array in the absence of flow are used to demonstrate the performance of MACS.