Design of a three dimensional wall jet facility

Abstract

The three dimensional wall jets can be found in some important industrial applications such as burners, boilers, gas turbine combustion chambers, vertical landing airplanes and fuel injection systems. This engineering field requires specific facilities where experiments and investigations can be undertaken. First the scope of the project contained the design, the building and the testing of the facility, but this scope had to be reduced in order to be able to finish the project in the established time. In Figure 1 is shown a schematic three dimensional view of the elements which will compose the entire facility.The project purpose is to design a facility which permits the measurement and study of the three dimensional wall jets using water and meant to use optical devices to measure the properties of the flow. After a deep review of the literature, I started to find the way to design in the most accurate manner the test section of the facility. However, the first results obtained for the dimensions of the test section were too large and I had to find the way to give a better design to achieve smaller dimensions. There is not a single method to follow to design such a facility like this, which makes it more complicated than it could seem at the first instance. Once the size of the test section was found, I continued with stress analysis iii simulations which were helpful in order to choose the material for the test section and ensure that this part of the facility would be able to handle such a large amount of water. Afterwards, the flow conditioner was designed. The flow conditioner is composed by a conical expansion, different wire screens, a straightener and a contraction which ensures that the flow at the exit of the flow conditioner has the desired characteristics. Finally, the last part of the design was the selection of a water pump that could ensure that the water could flow through all the devices and satisfy the requirements set for the flow.