CFD model of a compact supply air fan unit

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Price Industries Limited, a Manitoba-based leader in North America of the design and manufacture of heating**ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) equipment, needs to improve the performance of a compact air**supply fan unit. The unit is commonly used to provide airflow to building zones where the heating and cooling**loads vary.**The unit consists of a casing, an electronics panel, a small centrifugal fan, the fan housing, and a motor. The**improvement of the performance of the fan unit will lead to significant long-term energy savings for customers.**It is not obvious which changes to design parameters are required to achieve the improved performance. It may**require a combination of changes to the casing, fan housing, and fan blades. Exploring these changes**experimentally could involve many costly and time-consuming trial-and-error tests.**The company wants to be able to use CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) modelling to explore design**changes that will result in optimization of the fan unit. The CFD analysis will predict the three-dimensional air**flow in the unit. Later, for the optimization process, the geometry and fan parameters can be changed and the**resulting performance will be predicted in detail by the software. This capability will yield economic benefits**for Price Industries by shortening the design cycle and making the company more competitive in this product**category. The first step, however, is to obtain a reliable CFD model for the current fan unit configuration.**The objectives of this project are to develop a steady-state CFD model of the fan unit using commercial**software and to validate that model. Model parameters will be varied and comparisons with available in-house**experimental data will be performed.