• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.3
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• pp.665-675
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• 2019

The wire-wrapped fuel bundle is an assembly design in a sodium-cooled fast reactor. A wire spacer is used to maintain a constant gap between rods and to enhance the mixing of coolants. The wire makes the flow complicated by creating a sweeping flow and vortex flow. The vortex affects the flow field and heat transfer inside the subchannels. However, studies on vortices in this geometry are limited. The purpose of this research is to investigate the vortex flow created in the wire-wrapped fuel bundle. For analysis, a RANS-based numerical analysis was conducted for a 37-pin geometry. The sensitivity study shows that simulation with the shear stress transport model is appropriate. For the case of Re of 37,100, the mechanisms of onset, periodicity, and rotational direction were analyzed. The vortex structures were reconstructed in a three-dimensional space. Vortices were periodically created in the interior subchannel three times for one wire rotation. In the edge subchannel, the largest vortex occurred. This large vortex structure blocked the swirl flow in the peripheral region. The small vortex formed in the corner subchannel was negligible. The results can help in understanding the flow field inside subchannels with sweeping flow and vortex structures.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Visualization
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.77-83
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• 2020

A uniflow cyclone has simple structure with a single channel in one direction. The one directional particle removal enables the uniflow cyclone to have compact size and low pressure drop. However, it has low collection efficiency compared to conventional cyclones. In this study, the effect of primary geometry on the performance of a uniflow cyclone with swirl vane is numerically investigated for the design of high performance uniflow cyclone. It is found that as the vortex finder diameter is increased, the pressure drop and the collection efficiency are decreased. Also, the same trend is predicted when the vortex finder height is increased. The best collection efficiency is predicted to be obtained when the vortex finder height is equal to the diameter of a cyclone. Reducing the body height by half will increase the pressure drop by 41%. When the body height is decreased, the collection efficiency is first increased and then decreased. The best collection efficiency is obtained when the body height is 4~5 times the cyclone diameter. Overall, the particle collection efficiency is highest when the Dν/D is equal to 0.3. But, the pressure drop is as high as 1592 Pa. Considering both collection efficiency and pressure drop, the best design is when Dν/D, Hν/D, and Hb/D are equal to 0.5, 1, and 5, respectively.

• Korean Chemical Engineering Research
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• v.62 no.2
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• pp.191-199
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• 2024

A study was conducted on a tubular heat exchanger to improve its heat transfer rate by using a novel baffle plate design with discontinuous swirling patterns. The design consisted of perforated baffle plates with rectangular air deflectors positioned at varying angles. The tubes in the heat exchanger were arranged in a consistent alignment with the airflow direction and exposed to a uniform heat flux on their surfaces. Each baffle plate included sixteen deflectors inclined at the same angle and arranged in a clockwise pattern. This arrangement induced a swirling motion of the air inside a circular duct where the heated tubes were located, leading to increased turbulence and improved heat transfer on the tube surfaces. The spacing between the baffle plates was adjusted at different pitch ratios, and the Reynolds number was controlled within a range of 16,000 to 29,000. The effects of pitch ratios and inclination angles on the heat exchanger's performance were analyzed. The results indicated that using a baffle plate with rectangular deflectors inclined at 30° and a pitch ratio of 1.2 resulted in an average increase of 1.29 in the thermal enhancement factor.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural Science
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.81-97
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• 1987

Two nozzles with different size (Figure 2) were particularly designed to supply air through the swirl core into the central part of the liquid stream in the same parallel direction to produce a well-mixed air and water in the whirl chamber as spray liquid in bubble formation. Atomization was attempted to improve by using both the preliminary break-up process with less viscosity and less surface tension in the whirl chamber and the effects of increased frequency of the band of drops with the raised ambient air density in front of the nozzle orifice. The volumetric ratio between spray liquid and air on four levels was used to investigate the effects of air as a component of the mixture on atomization. The results of the experiment were summarized as follows; Droplet size became progressively finer as the operating pressure was increased in the range of $0.70kg/cm^2$ to $6.33kg/cm^2$, which was similar to the previous works. The new atomizing mechanism so-called 'air-center nozzle' gave a narrower range in droplet size distribution with smaller volumetric median diameter (VMD) than that of the existing spray system at a given pressure, which showed the possibility of improvement of atomization in a certain limit. The volumetric median diameter produced by the new atomizing mechanism was decreased from the central region toward the exterior edges across the spray pattern.

• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.38 no.4
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• pp.367-375
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• 2014

In numbers of kinds of heat exchanger, the shell-tube heat exchanger is the most commonly used type of heat exchanger in the industry field. In order to improve the thermal performance of the heat exchanger, this study was analyzed heat transfer characteristics according to arrangement of baffle and direction of baffle and bump phase of baffle about shell-tube heat exchanger using appropriate SST (Shear Stress Transport) turbulence model for flow separation and boundary layer analysis. As the boundary condition for CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) analysis, the inlet temperature of shell side was constantly 344 K and the variation of the water flow rate was 6, 12, 18 and 24 l/min. As the result of analysis, zigzag baffle arrangement enhances heat transfer rate and pressure drop. Furthermore, in the direction of the baffle, heat transfer rate is more improved with vertical type and angle $45^{\circ}$ type than existing type, and pressure drop was little difference. Also, the bump shape of baffle surface contributes to heat transfer rate and pressure drop improvement due to the increased heat transfer area. Through analysis results, we knew that the increase of the heat transfer was influenced by flow separation, fluid residual time, contact area with the tube, flow rate, swirl and so on.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Propulsion Engineers Conference
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• 2011.04a
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• pp.1-2
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• 2011

Hybrid rockets have lately attracted attention as a strong candidate of small, low cost, safe and reliable launch vehicles. A significant topic is that the first commercially sponsored space ship, SpaceShipOne vehicle chose a hybrid rocket. The main factors for the choice were safety of operation, system cost, quick turnaround, and thrust termination. In Japan, five universities including Hokkaido University and three private companies organized "Hybrid Rocket Research Group" from 1998 to 2002. Their main purpose was to downsize the cost and scale of rocket experiments. In 2002, UNISEC (University Space Engineering Consortium) and HASTIC (Hokkaido Aerospace Science and Technology Incubation Center) took over the educational and R&D rocket activities respectively and the research group dissolved. In 2008, JAXA/ISAS and eleven universities formed "Hybrid Rocket Research Working Group" as a subcommittee of the Steering Committee for Space Engineering in ISAS. Their goal is to demonstrate technical feasibility of lowcost and high frequency launches of nano/micro satellites into sun-synchronous orbits. Hybrid rockets use a combination of solid and liquid propellants. Usually the fuel is in a solid phase. A serious problem of hybrid rockets is the low regression rate of the solid fuel. In single port hybrids the low regression rate below 1 mm/s causes large L/D exceeding a hundred and small fuel loading ratio falling below 0.3. Multi-port hybrids are a typical solution to solve this problem. However, this solution is not the mainstream in Japan. Another approach is to use high regression rate fuels. For example, a fuel regression rate of 4 mm/s decreases L/D to around 10 and increases the loading ratio to around 0.75. Liquefying fuels such as paraffins are strong candidates for high regression fuels and subject of active research in Japan too. Nakagawa et al. in Tokai University employed EVA (Ethylene Vinyl Acetate) to modify viscosity of paraffin based fuels and investigated the effect of viscosity on regression rates. Wada et al. in Akita University employed LTP (Low melting ThermoPlastic) as another candidate of liquefying fuels and demonstrated high regression rates comparable to paraffin fuels. Hori et al. in JAXA/ISAS employed glycidylazide-poly(ethylene glycol) (GAP-PEG) copolymers as high regression rate fuels and modified the combustion characteristics by changing the PEG mixing ratio. Regression rate improvement by changing internal ballistics is another stream of research. The author proposed a new fuel configuration named "CAMUI" in 1998. CAMUI comes from an abbreviation of "cascaded multistage impinging-jet" meaning the distinctive flow field. A CAMUI type fuel grain consists of several cylindrical fuel blocks with two ports in axial direction. The port alignment shifts 90 degrees with each other to make jets out of ports impinge on the upstream end face of the downstream fuel block, resulting in intense heat transfer to the fuel. Yuasa et al. in Tokyo Metropolitan University employed swirling injection method and improved regression rates more than three times higher. However, regression rate distribution along the axis is not uniform due to the decay of the swirl strength. Aso et al. in Kyushu University employed multi-swirl injection to solve this problem. Combinations of swirling injection and paraffin based fuel have been tried and some results show very high regression rates exceeding ten times of conventional one. High fuel regression rates by new fuel, new internal ballistics, or combination of them require faster fuel-oxidizer mixing to maintain combustion efficiency. Nakagawa et al. succeeded to improve combustion efficiency of a paraffin-based fuel from 77% to 96% by a baffle plate. Another effective approach some researchers are trying is to use an aft-chamber to increase residence time. Better understanding of the new flow fields is necessary to reveal basic mechanisms of regression enhancement. Yuasa et al. visualized the combustion field in a swirling injection type motor. Nakagawa et al. observed boundary layer combustion of wax-based fuels. To understand detailed flow structures in swirling flow type hybrids, Sawada et al. (Tohoku Univ.), Teramoto et al. (Univ. of Tokyo), Shimada et al. (ISAS), and Tsuboi et al. (Kyushu Inst. Tech.) are trying to simulate the flow field numerically. Main challenges are turbulent reaction, stiffness due to low Mach number flow, fuel regression model, and other non-steady phenomena. Oshima et al. in Hokkaido University simulated CAMUI type flow fields and discussed correspondence relation between regression distribution of a burning surface and the vortex structure over the surface.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.7-12
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• 2018

Thermal NOx is generated in a high temperature environment in a combustion facilities. Exhaust gas recirculation method is widely used among various methods for reducing nitrogen oxides in combustion devices. In the present study, the computational fluid dynamic analysis was accomplished to elucidate the cold flow characteristics in the flue gas recirculation burner with both outlets opening. Because the reciculation pipes is installed toward the tangential direction, the swirling flow is formulated in the burner and the phenomenon of the reverse flow creation is detected at the center area of circular burner. We are confirmed that this is the similar trend with the burner with one side outlet closed. From the present study, it was seen that the recirculated inflow from both recirculated burner outlets increased by about 5% compared to the burner with one side outlet opening. At the outlet located at the exhaust gas recirculation pipe inlet(gas exit 1), the inlet flow was formed in the entire region. At the opposite outlet(gas exit 2), the total flow was discharged, but the center part of the burner was observed to have a reverse flow. The flow rate at the gas exit 2 was 3 ~ 5 times larger than the flow rate at the gas exit 1.

• Journal of Energy Engineering
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.152-158
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• 2016

Nitrogen oxide is generated by the chemical reaction of oxygen and nitrogen in higher temperature environment of combustion facilities. The NOx reduction equipment is generally used in the power plant or incineration plant and it causes enormous cost for the construction and maintenance. The flue gas recirculation method is commonly adopted for the reduction of NOx formation in the combustion facilities. In the present study, the computational fluid dynamic analysis was accomplished to elucidated the cold flow characteristics in the flue gas recirculation burner with coanda nozzles in the flue gas recirculation pipe. The inlet and outlet of flue gas recirculation pipes are directed toward the tangential direction of circular burner not toward the center of burner. The swirling flow is formed in the burner and it causes the reverse flow in the burner. The ratio of flue gas recirculation flow rate with the air flow rate was about 2.5 for the case with the coanda nozzle gap, 0.5mm and it was 1.5 for the case with the gap, 1.0mm. With the same coanda nozzle gap, the flue gas recirculation flow rate ratio had a little increase when the air flow rate changes from 1.1 to 2.2 times of ideal air flow rate.