As the consciousness of energy saving and carbon reduction and comfortable environment is paid increasing attention to, the common objective of various countries with decreasing energy is to develop and popularize high efficiency and low running noise blowers. This study uses CFD to calculate the flow field and performance of a blower and compare with the experimental measurement. The characteristic curve of blower shows that the simulated and experimental values are close to each other, the difference between the values is only 0.4%. This analysis result proofs the CFD package is a highly reliable tool for the future blower design improvement. In addition, this study discusses the noise distribution of blower flow field, the periodic pressure output value calculated by CFD is used in the sound source input of sound pressure field, so as to simulate and analyze the aerodynamic noise reading of the flow field around the blower. The result shows that the simulated value of flow field around the fan has as high as 80.5 dB(A) ∼ 81.5 dB(A) noise level and is agree with measurement (82 dB(A)). The noise level is low but has a sharp noise. According to the numerical results, designer of the blower modify the tongue geometry and remove the sharp noise.

An experimental investigation was conducted to correlate thermal characteristics with primary reference fuel (PRF) using an “isothermal” flow reactor. Objective of the investigation was to assess whether or not thermal characteristics measured in a radiant-heated flow reactor could serve as an indicator of fuel octane number. The experimental set-up consisted of a radiant furnace and a pyrex-tube test section inside. The pyrex tube was fitted with thermocouples alongside the tube wall. Four PRF compositions of iso-octane and n-heptane were considered: 0, 65, 85 and 100% of iso-octane by volume; noted as PRF0, 65, 85 and 100, respectively. The test conditions reported in the paper set the fuel-air mixture temperature to 180 °C at the inlet of the test section and the radian furnace temperature to 345 °C. The equivalence ratio was set in the range 0.93 to 2.0. For a pre-set PRF and equivalence-ratio condition, the experiments were run with fixed mixture velocities over the range 0.019 m/s to 0.400 m/s. Over the conditions tested, the thermocouples recorded two temperature oscillations along the flow reactor for each of PRF0, 65 and 85 mixtures. Both oscillation locations moved downstream when PRF number was increased and the two oscillation locations merged when PRF was set to 85. No temperature oscillations were recorded for experiments with PRF100 mixture. The results suggest that the temperature oscillation locations from the experiments using isothermal flow-reactors can be used to correlate fuel octane number.

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