EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE COOLING AIR FLOW IN AN ELECTRIC GENERATOR
Paper in proceeding, 2011

The cooling air flow in a small-scale electric generator has been investigated experimentally and numerically, and the results have been compared to each other. The studies have been made in cold conditions, without heat transfer. The velocity profiles at the inlet of the generator have been measured by means of a 5-hole probe, traversed in the axial direction to give the axial distribution of the radial velocities at the inlet of the generator. The outlet velocity distribution has been measured by means of a total-pressure rake, consisting of a number of total pressure probes, which gives the horizontal distribution of the velocity magnitudes, aligned with the stator channels at the outlet of the generator. Smoke visualization of the flow has been performed at the inlet of the generator and the flow pattern has been visualized. The numerical study has been performed using the OpenFOAM open source CFD software. The corresponding numerical velocity profiles at the inlet and the outlet of the generator have been extracted and compared with the experimental profiles. The velocity vectors at the inlet of the generator have been compared to the flow pattern obtained by the smoke visualization. Because of geometrical dissimilarities between the experimental rig and the numerical computational domain, there are unavoidable differences in the results. This yields a qualitative comparison, although the comparisons still show a relatively good quantitative agreement between the experiments and the numerical simulations. (Note: Figure 13 and its description updated)

Heat transfer

OpenFOAM

Numerical analyis

Experimental measurements

Generator cooling

Author

Pirooz Moradnia

Chalmers, Applied Mechanics, Fluid Dynamics

Valery Chernoray

Chalmers, Applied Mechanics, Fluid Dynamics

Håkan Nilsson

Chalmers, Applied Mechanics, Fluid Dynamics

HEFAT2011, 8th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics

242-249

Subject Categories

Energy Engineering

Fluid Mechanics and Acoustics

Areas of Advance

Energy

More information

Created

10/6/2017