Performance Determination of Axial Wind Tunnel Fan with Reverse Engineering, Numerical and Experimental Methods

Abstract

In today's technology, in case of the need for rehabilitation, renovation, or damage, it is necessary to recover the problems quickly with a cost-effective approach. In the case of destructive failure, or misdesign of the devices, replacing the problematic part with the new design is crucial. In order to substitute the related part with the efficient one, reverse engineering (RE) methodology is utilized. In this paper, from the perspective of engineering implementation and based on the idea of reverse engineering, axial wind tunnel fan is rehabilitated using numerical and experimental methods. The current study is focused on an axial pressurization fan placed into Cankaya University Mechanical Engineering Laboratory wind tunnel that has firm guaranteed specifications of 5.55 m(3)/s airflow capacity. The measurements performed during experiments showed that the fan provides less than 60% airflow compared with firm guaranteed specifications. In order to determine the problems of the existing fan, a reverse engineering methodology is developed, and the noncontact data acquisition method is used to form a computer aided drawing (CAD) model. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methodology is developed to analyze existing geometry numerically, and results are compared with an experimental study to verify numerical methodology. According to the results, the prediction accuracy of the numerical method can attain 92.95% and 96.38% for flowrate and efficiency, respectively, at the maximum error points.