• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.75-84
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• 2000

Performance and flow characteristics of a small forward swept propeller fan for home refrigerators are studied experimentally. An unusual discontinuity is observed in the performance curve of the fan. Mean flow fields measured with as-hole Pitot probe reveal that the flow is axial at the high flow rate and radial at the low flow rate. The flow structure changes abruptly across the discontinuity. Unsteady flow measurements with a set of hot-wire probes indicate that near the discontinuity a single-cell stall rotates at 40% speed of the fan speed, while away from the discontinuity the flow shows periodic variation corresponding to the blade passage frequency. Phase-lock averaged flow fields measured with a triple-sensor hot-wire probe show that there appears radially inward flow over the pressure side of the blade and the outward passage flow over the tip.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.362-373
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• 2002

A stereoscopic PIV (SPIV) measurement system based on the translation configuration was developed and applied to the flow behind a forward-swept axial-fan. Measurement of three orthogonal velocity components is essential for flow analysis of three-dimensional flows such as flow around a fan or propeller. In this study, the translation configuration was adopted to calculate the out-of-plane velocity component from 2-D PIV data obtained from two CCD cameras. The error caused by the out-of-plane motion was estimated by direct comparison of the 2-D PIV and 3-D SPIV results that measured from the particle images captured simultaneously. The comparison shows that the error ratio is relatively high in the region of higher out-of-plane motion near the axial fan blade. The turbulence intensity measured by the 2-D PIV method is bigger by about 5.8% in maximum compared with that of the 3-D SPIV method. The phase-averaged velocity field results show that the wake behind an axial fan has a periodic flow structure with respect to the blade phase and the characteristic flow structure is shifted downstream in the next phase.