20-10-2012, 10:59 AM
EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION & ANALYSIS OF HEAT TRANSFER OF AIR COMPRESSOR CYLINDER BY MODIFYING EXTERNAL FINS USING ANSYS.
ABSTRACT
Most air compressors are either reciprocating piston type or rotary vane or rotary screw. Centrifugal compressors are common in very large applications such as supply a high-pressure clean air to fill gas cylinders, supply a large amount of moderate pressure air to power pneumatic tools.
In air compressor heat can be generated by two ways, heat produced by friction as well as by due to compressing of air at high pressure .So this heat will transfer to atmosphere by fins. As engineers we are primarily interested in knowing the extent to which particular extended surfaces or fin arrangements could improve heat transfer from a surface to the surrounding fluid.
To determine the heat transfer rate associated with a fin, we must first obtain the temperature distribution along the fin. But normally annular fin is one that is circumferentially attached to a cylinder, and its cross section varies with radius from the centerline of the cylinder. In our project we altered geometrical shapes of fins for experiment process and select most effective cooling fin.
Finite element method (FEM) is important numerical techniques used in engineering analyses. Usually elements are sub-divided uniformly in FEM (conventional FEM, CFEM) to obtain temperature distribution behavior in a fin or plate. In this project, non-uniform sub-elements are considered for FEM solution to reduce the computational complexity. Then this FEM is applied for the solution of one-dimensional heat transfer problem in a rectangular thin fin. The obtained results are compared with CFEM