Pneumatic Compressor Inlet Elbow Internal Flow Calculation And Optimization Of Design

The performance of modern internal combustion engine for locomotives often depend on the improvement of the supercharge performance. As part of the main component of the compressor, the inlet turning tube will affect the performance, especially the surge margin, of the compressor directly. The design and research work on the inlet turning tube had been carried out mainly based on the experiment results and working experience. With the development of computational fluid mechanics (CFD), it is quilt possible to simulate the flow inside the inlet turning tube accurately and get a better understanding of the flow phenomena in the flow field to guide the design, In this paper, detained simulations of the flow fields inside two different compressor inlet turning tubes have been presented. Based on the analysis of the numerical results, some basic principles for the design have been found out.The simulation work begins with the analysis of the special features of the two compressor inlet turning tubes. Based on this analysis, the three梔imensional flow passage models have been created using PRO梕, an engineering modeling software. Then the PRO梕 models have been input into PRO梐m, an automatic mesh generating software, to create the mesh system for numerical simulation. After defining some proper boundary condition, the flow analysis have been performed through the use of STAR桟D, a powerful CFD software. With some careful analysis of the simulation results and comparison of the two models, some guiding principles for the design optimization of the compressor inlet turning tubes have been concluded.