Vol 23, No 5 (2016)

In the vicinity of a semicircular airfoil with slot suction of air provided with a 0.2-diameter (chord) vortex cell installed on the backside of the wing, at low speeds and zero angle of attack the pattern of the unsteady separated air-flow undergoes substantial changes, those changes being accompanied with the displacement of flow separation point toward the trailing edge. The slot suction of air and its blowout into the near wake in such an airfoil is organized using a discharge channel with a fan; from this channel, the air jet is discharged into atmosphere tangentially to the airfoil base, with the pressure drop in the fan being equal to twice the pressure head. Under such conditions, the integral force characteristics of the wing show dramatic changes: the lift force, initially being ultra-low negative, becomes positive, and the drag decreases two-fold. The static pressure decreases by two or three times on the upper arch of the profile, and it increases by two times on the lower part of the airfoil, the level of pressure pulsations decreasing by more than ten times.

The decay of a far wake and its turbulent fluctuations behind two thin discs of the same diameter D, oriented normal to the incident flow, have been studied using the Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV). The experimental study was carried out in a water flume (Re ≈ 2·10⁵) with varying distances between the discs (L_х = 4–8D) and their axes shift relative to each other (0, 0.5D and 1D). It is found that the velocity deficit behind two discs depends weakly on L_x, and at L_х > 40D, it becomes indistinguishable from the level of turbulent fluctuations of the incident flow. It is found that the decay of the average velocity deficit and its turbulent fluctuations in a wake of a tandem of discs can be described by the same analytical dependence with exponent–2/3 as for the wake decay of a single disc. However, at the same distance downstream, the value of deficit behind two discs is substantially higher than the corresponding value behind a single disc. Velocity fluctuations in a far wake behind a pair of discs depend weakly on longitudinal dimension L_x, but at the same time, in contrast to the velocity deficit, their level does not differ significantly from the level of fluctuations behind a single disc.

The results of the numerical modeling of turbulent structure of the penetrating convection above the urban heat island with a small aspect ratio in a stably stratified medium at rest are presented. The gradient diffusion representations for turbulent momentum and heat fluxes are used, which depend on three parameters — the turbulence kinetic energy, the velocity of its spectral expenditure, and the dispersion of temperature fluctuations. These parameters are found from the closed differential equations of balance in the RANS approach of turbulence description. The distributions of averaged velocity and temperature fields as well as turbulent characteristics agree well with measurement data.

There are various matching ways between turbocharger and engine, the variable nozzle turbine is the most significant method. The turbine design must be economic with high efficiency and large capacity over a wide range of operational conditions. These design intents are used in order to decrease thermal load and improve thermal efficiency of the engine. This paper presents an original design method of a variable nozzle vane for mixed flow turbines developed from previous experimental and numerical studies. The new device is evaluated with a numerical simulation over a wide range of rotational speeds, pressure ratios, and different vane angles. The compressible turbulent steady flow is solved using the ANSYS CFX software. The numerical results agree well with experimental data in the nozzleless configuration. In the variable nozzle case, the results show that the turbine performance characteristics are well accepted in different open positions and improved significantly in low speed regime and at low pressure ratio.

The focus of this numerical study is to conceive a new basic film cooling configuration in order to increase film cooling effectiveness, especially at the leading edge zone between the injection holes where cooling is mostly needed. The new configuration, resulting from the tangential slot configuration and especially adapted to the leading edge of an asymmetrical blade, is compared to the uniform slot configuration. Three alternatives geometries were proposed and numerically tested to find the configuration that provides the best film cooling effectiveness. The simulation is conducted at a fixed density ratio of 1.0 and a blowing ratio of 0.7. A new parameter, Rc, is defined to measure the rate of blade coverage by the film cooling. The outcomes of the numerical results indicate that the three proposed configurations allow better thermal protection because of their higher film cooling coverage. At suction side, the new configurations provide a better film cooling coverage than the baseline case. The minimal improvement is at approximately 34%, with a light superiority of case 1. At pressure side, the use of the tangential slot is especially interesting for the allowed minimum adiabatic effectiveness values between 0.3 and 0.5.

A study of the sorption properties of a composite sorbent prepared from pseudoboehmite and synthetic sodium-borosilicate glass microspheres was performed with the aim of using the sorbent in membrane-sorption processes of helium extraction from natural gas with its simultaneous drying. Experimentally, permeability of the composite sorbent under study with respect to helium and its impermeability to air and methane has been demonstrated. Under experimental conditions, the absolute moisture content of the gas mixture having passed through the sorbent has reduced from 21.1 to 0.013 g/m³. The rate of helium adsorption by the composite sorbent has increased nearly by two orders of magnitude in comparison with the initial microspheres. It was found that the degree of saturation of the sorbent with water vapor had almost no influence on the rate of helium adsorption. A possibility of optimal use of the composite sorbent by combining the process of natural-gas drying from water vapor and the process of helium extraction from natural gas is shown. This possibility permits shortening of the process sequence for natural gas pre-conditioning prior to helium extraction.

The article presents the results of theoretical and experimental studies of the production of high-temperature silicate melts using the energy of low-temperature plasma in a conceptually new setup. A mathematical model of unsteady regimes of convective heat and mass transfer is developed and numerically implemented under the assumption of non-Newtonian nature of flow in the melting furnace with plasma-chemical synthesis of high-temperature silicate melts. Experiments on melting silicate containing materials were carried out using the energy of low-temperature plasma. The dependence of dynamic viscosity of various silicate materials (basalt, ash, waste of oil shale) was found experimentally.

The application of the weighted residuals method is considered for the calculation of heat transfer in flowing thin liquid films. As an example, the problem of the film moving under the action of the gas flow on the heated horizontal wall is solved. The solution demonstrates good agreement with the numerical one obtained by the finite-difference method.