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Application of Computational Fluid Dynamics in Thermal Energy Management

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A special issue of Energies (ISSN 1996-1073). This special issue belongs to the section "J: Thermal Management".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2022) | Viewed by 12172

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Jianguo Yan

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Guest Editor

State Key Laboratory of Eco-hydraulics in Northwest Arid Region, Xi’an University of Technology, Xi’an 710048, China
Interests: multiphase flow and heat transfer; supercritical fluids; cavitation flow

Dr. Denghui He

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

State Key Laboratory of Eco-hydraulics in Northwest Arid Region, Xi’an University of Technology, Xi’an 710048, China
Interests: cavitation and cavitating flow; measuring techniques for multiphase flow; computational fluid mechanics; turbomachinery

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Thermal energy management plays an important role in the development of renewable energy systems, such as solar energy, nuclear energy, and geothermal energy. In these energy systems, fluid flow is of major importance, because the fluid transportation of energy and mass is a fundamental issue in thermal conversion and management. The necessity to further explore the underlying physical laws of fluid flow and heat transfer is found in a wide range of industrial applications.

Currently, with the development of computation power and numerical techniques, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has become one of the major tools for use in the prediction of fluid flow in thermal energy management systems. However, CFD modelling of fluid flow problems is full of challenges caused by coupled nonlinear governing equations, multiphase flow systems, complex flow field structures, etc. Therefore, it is necessary to develop more advanced CFD modelling methods, which can contribute to the exploration of physical laws of fluid flow in thermal energy management systems.

We invite you to submit original research articles that address recent advancements in CFD applications for thermal energy management systems, especially for fluid flow and heat and mass transfer in renewable energy systems.

Dr. Jianguo Yan
Dr. Denghui He
Guest Editors

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Published Papers (7 papers)

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Research

15 pages, 6117 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Numerical Investigation of the Effect of Surface Wettability and Rotation on Condensation Heat Transfer in a Sludge Dryer Vertical Paddle

by Wei Liu, Miao Gui, Yudong Zha and Zengyao Li

Energies 2023, 16(2), 901; https://doi.org/10.3390/en16020901 - 12 Jan 2023

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1596

Abstract

In this paper, the applicability of advanced heat transfer enhancement technology to a paddle dryer was discussed. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method was used to simulate condensation heat transfer on the inner surface of a dryer paddle. The effect of surface wettability and rotation on condensation heat transfer and droplet behavior was studied. The results showed that the present CFD model could properly simulate the condensation process on a vertical surface. With a decrease in the contact angle, the filmwise condensation turned into a dropwise condensation, which resulted in a significant increase in heat transfer coefficient and provided an approximately 5% increase in evaporation rate for the paddle dryer by changing the wettability of the inner surface of the paddle. Additionally, with a change in rotational angular velocity, heat transfer performance was almost unchanged under the filmwise condensation condition. However, rotational motion might cause a decrease in wall temperature and the equivalent evaporation rate under the dropwise condensation condition. Only a 2.4% increase in the equivalent evaporation rate was found in dropwise condensation with rotation, which indicated that changing the wettability inside the paddle could not be an effective means to enhance the heat transfer and drying efficiency of a rotating paddle dryer. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Application of Computational Fluid Dynamics in Thermal Energy Management)

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14 pages, 5491 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Influence of Fluid Viscosity on Cavitation Characteristics of a Helico-Axial Multiphase Pump (HAMP)

by Kaijie Ye, Denghui He, Lin Zhao and Pengcheng Guo

Energies 2022, 15(21), 8149; https://doi.org/10.3390/en15218149 - 1 Nov 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1249

Abstract

Fluid viscosity is one of the key factors affecting the cavitation characteristics of the Helico-axial Multiphase Pump (HAMP). In this paper, fluids with viscosities of 24.46 mm²/s, 48.48 mm²/s, 60.70 mm²/s, and 120.0 mm²/s were investigated by numerical simulation. The Ansys Fluent software was employed to conduct the simulation. The mixture multiphase flow model and the RNG k-ε turbulence model were adopted. The Singhal cavitation model was employed to consider the effects of the non-condensable gas on cavitation. An experiment was carried out to validate the numerical method. The results showed that the Net Positive Suction Head-available (NPSHA) of the pump decreased as the fluid viscosity increased. Under the critical NPSHA condition, the NPSHA decreased from 5.11 m to 3.68 m as the fluid viscosity increased from 24.46 mm²/s to 120.0 mm²/s. This suggested that the cavitation performance of the pump was deteriorated under high fluid viscosity. The impeller passage area occupied by the vapor increased when the fluid viscosity increased. Nearly half of the flow passages were occupied by cavitation bubbles when the fluid viscosity increased to 120.0 mm²/s. The vapor volume fraction, both on the suction surface and pressure surface of the blade, increased with the fluid viscosity. The vapor on the suction surface was mainly distributed in the region with the streamwise between 0 and 0.36 when the fluid viscosity was 24.46 mm²/s; while the high vapor volume fraction range increased to the streamwise of 0.42 when the fluid viscosity increased to 120.0 mm²/s. The higher vapor volume fraction corresponded with the lower pressure. It was also found that the turbulent kinetic energy, both on the suction surface and pressure surface, increased with the fluid viscosity, which was the favorite for producing more cavitation bubbles. Furthermore, the maximum velocity area was mainly concentrated in the inlet area of the impeller. The velocity distribution in the impeller was basically the same with the viscosity of 24.46 mm²/s and 48.48 mm²/s. When the viscosity further increased to 60.70 mm²/s, the maximum velocity area in the impeller was relatively large. This study provides a reference for designing the HAMP. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Application of Computational Fluid Dynamics in Thermal Energy Management)

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28 pages, 12077 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Research on Vehicle Aerodynamics and Thermal Management Based on 1D and 3D Coupling Simulation

by Yingchao Zhang, Jiesong Jian, Guohua Wang, Yuhan Jia and Jintao Zhang

Energies 2022, 15(18), 6783; https://doi.org/10.3390/en15186783 - 16 Sep 2022

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2290

Abstract

In order to ensure the full heat dissipation of heat exchangers, the opening of the grille should be large, which increases the wind drag of the whole vehicle. Most of the research on the grille only focuses on its impact on the heat dissipation of the engine compartment; there is little research on its influence on the performance of the thermal management system, because it is difficult to solve the real-time data interaction of different dimensional models. So we established the 1D and 3D strong coupling model. The biggest difference from other 1D and 3D coupling models is that we can use the interfaces reserved by the two kinds of software to realize real-time data interaction, and simultaneously analyze the 1D thermal management performance and 3D flow field and temperature field of the engine components. The coupling model is used to study three heat balance conditions. The results show that the heat-sinking capability of the cooling system is the worst under the climbing condition; and the refrigeration capacity of the air-conditioning system is the worst under the idling condition. According to the heat balance results and evaluation index priorities, we determine the simulation process. In this article, first the upper grille is gradually closed; then the flow field, temperature field and evaluation indexes are studied through the strong coupling model to obtain the analysis results of the upper grille; then based on the results, the lower grille is gradually closed, and the analysis results of the lower grille are obtained in the same way. The final simulation results show that on the premise of ensuring the performances of engine cooling system and air conditioning refrigeration system, the air drag coefficient is reduced by 17.5 counts compared with the original vehicle. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Application of Computational Fluid Dynamics in Thermal Energy Management)

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19 pages, 1922 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Fault Detection and Identification of Furnace Negative Pressure System with CVA and GA-XGBoost

by Dan Ling, Chaosong Li, Yan Wang and Pengye Zhang

Energies 2022, 15(17), 6355; https://doi.org/10.3390/en15176355 - 31 Aug 2022

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1651

Abstract

The boiler is an essential energy conversion facility in a thermal power plant. One small malfunction or abnormal event will bring huge economic loss and casualties. Accurate and timely detection of abnormal events in boilers is crucial for the safe and economical operation of complex thermal power plants. Data-driven fault diagnosis methods based on statistical process monitoring technology have prevailed in thermal power plants, whereas the false alarm rates of those methods are relatively high. To work around this, this paper proposes a novel fault detection and identification method for furnace negative pressure system based on canonical variable analysis (CVA) and eXtreme Gradient Boosting improved by genetic algorithms (GA-XGBoost). First, CVA is used to reduce the data redundancy and construct the canonical residuals to measure the prediction ability of the state variables. Then, the fault detection model based on GA-XGBoost is schemed using the constructed canonical residual variables. Specially, GA is introduced to determine the optimal hyperparameters of XGBoost and speed up the convergence. Next, this paper presents a novel fault identification method based on the reconstructed contribution statistics, considering the contribution of state space, residual space and canonical residual space. Besides, the proposed statistics renders different weights to the state vectors, the residual vectors and the canonical residual vectors to improve the sensitivity of faulty variables. Finally, the real industrial data from a boiler furnace negative pressure system of a certain thermal power plant is used to demonstrate the ability of the proposed method. The result demonstrates that this method is accurate and efficient to detect and identify the faults of a true boiler. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Application of Computational Fluid Dynamics in Thermal Energy Management)

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15 pages, 4639 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Numerical Investigation on Thermal–Hydraulic Performance of a Printed Circuit Heat Exchanger for Liquid Air Energy Storage System

by Hu Liu, Yankang Zhang, Pengfei Yu, Jingwen Xue, Lei Zhang and Defu Che

Energies 2022, 15(17), 6347; https://doi.org/10.3390/en15176347 - 31 Aug 2022

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1461

Abstract

A printed circuit heat exchanger (PCHE) is utilized to cool the compressor inlet air to increase the compression efficiency in a liquid air energy storage and liquid natural gas (LNG) coupled system, which can offer large-scale energy storage with significantly improved exergy efficiency and round-trip efficiency. In this work, the effect of pressure of air, incline angle, and hydraulic diameter on the performance of a compressed air–water PCHE with a semicircle cross-section was studied. The results show that PCHE can realize the intermediate cooling of air compression in the liquid air energy storage system, and the pressure variation of air shows a limited effect on the heat transfer of PCHE; however, the hydraulic diameter and the incline angle both affect the heat transfer and the flow resistance of PCHE, and the best incline angle is 15°. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Application of Computational Fluid Dynamics in Thermal Energy Management)

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21 pages, 8677 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Numerical Simulation of Multi-Nozzle Droplet Evaporation Characteristics for Desulfurization Wastewater

by Xinrui Guo, Jiangbo Wu, Xiaoze Du, Yaocong Zhang, Shuqin Feng and Shujun Liu

Energies 2022, 15(14), 5180; https://doi.org/10.3390/en15145180 - 17 Jul 2022

Viewed by 1623

Abstract

Spraying flue gas desulfurization wastewater into flue ducts is an emerging technology that is receiving extensive attention in thermal power plants. In order to study the evaporative performance of wastewater-atomizing droplets under variable working conditions, a combined Euler–Lagrange model was developed to demonstrate the thermal behavior of FGD wastewater spray evaporation in flue gas. The effects of several control factors under various operating conditions were numerically determined and validated against experimental data. Due to the complicated parameters and various other conditions, a least-square support vector machine (LSSVM) model relying on numerical results was used to anticipate the evaporation rate of the droplets. We prove that the LSSVM model has high prediction accuracy for the evaporation rate at different cross-sections of flue under a different operating situation. The conclusion is that for the sake of improving the quality of evaporation, the spacing between two adjacent nozzles should be increased while increasing the flow rate. However, using a higher flue gas temperature, higher initial temperature and smaller diameter of droplets can shorten the time and distance of complete evaporation. In summary, this research analysis can be used effectively to determine the design of the FGD wastewater flue gas evaporative process in thermal power plants. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Application of Computational Fluid Dynamics in Thermal Energy Management)

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16 pages, 4720 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Numerical Simulations and Analyses of Mechanically Pumped Two-Phase Loop System for Space Remote Sensor

by Feng Yu and Qingliang Meng

Energies 2022, 15(14), 5039; https://doi.org/10.3390/en15145039 - 10 Jul 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1557

Abstract

A mechanically pumped two-phase loop (MPTL) system used for the accurate and stable thermal control of orbital heat sources can show excellent characteristics. In order to study the dynamic behaviors of heat and mass transfer of MPTL systems, particularly in response to heat load variations, a transient numerical model was developed by using the time-dependent Navier-Stokes equations. A comparison between the simulation and test results indicated that the errors of mass flow rate were at around ±10%, of which the validity and accuracy were verified. The model was used to study the operating state, and flow and heat characteristics on the basis of the analyses of variations in mass flow rate, temperature, and quality under different operating conditions. Above all, the complex transient behaviors in response to heat load variations in an MPTL system were studied in this model, such as the mass transfer between the accumulator and loop. Results indicate that the phenomenon of mass exchange occurs between the main loop and the accumulator when the heating power increased or decreased. Variations in temperature and pressure in the accumulator were different for the cases of increasing and decreasing power. The slope of the exchange rate curve and the maximal value of the flow rate decreased with the increase in filling amount. The model could be used to guide the design of MPTL systems and to predict the behavior before a system is built. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Application of Computational Fluid Dynamics in Thermal Energy Management)

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