Flow behavior and energy separation in Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube with 27mm tube diameter

Abstract

Computational fluid dynamics and experimental studies has been conducted to analyze the energy separation effect of the Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube. Commercial CFD code, Star-CCM+, has been used for the flow simulation. Generally a vortex tube without a sleeve has fixed cold and hot flow direction. It is found that the cold and hot flow direction of the vortex tube with the sleeve can be reversed for certain conditions. One is that the orifice diameter of a vortex generator is very close to that of sleeve, and the other is that the mass flow rate to the direction of the throttling exit is increased more than 50 percentage of the total flow rate. It is found that the flow behavior in the vortex tube has very strong effect on the energy separation process. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.