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This paper aims to present a wind tunnel, aiming to examine the effect of airflow past the hand-shape mold especially airflow around the gap between the fingers of the mold. Part of the aim of this project is to investigate the behavior of airflow past the mold on the different angles, which was valuable to vulcanize rubber glove in the oven. The wind tunnel experiments were performed on the various angle of attack of hand-shape mold from 0 to 180 degrees under the airflow velocity of 5 to 20 m/s. The 3D simulations were carried out by using open source code software, OpenFOAM. The k-? model was used to simulate the turbulent flow past hand-shape mold. The pressure-velocity coupling problem and the convection-diffusion term were solved by using a SIMPLE algorithm and upwind differencing scheme, respectively. The drag force by airflow on the rubber glove mold which obtained by the computational fluid dynamics (henceforth CFD) method was compared with the experimental data. The comparison between CFD simulation and the experimental data showed a fairly close agreement and the average error was less than 13.96%. Further research in this field would be of great help in developing a model to optimize the mold installation inside the rubber glove oven.

Turbulence models do not perform well near walls because the Reynolds number in this interesting area is low. The wall functions and the advantage method can be efficiently used to model fluid flow at the near wall region. The Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes turbulence models which had the developed wall functions in Open FOAM, the open source CFD software, were evaluated by the turbulent flow. The 3-D lid-driven cavity flow at the turbulence Reynolds number of 10,000 with various spanwise aspect ratio had been referred to validate these turbulence models. The comparison shown that the realizable k-ɛ turbulence model with the standard k and ɛ wall functions of OpenFOAM was the most powerful model to represent the velocity profile of water flow in the 3-D lid-driven cavities.

This research aimed to simulate the flow past a rib and backward-facing step (BFS). The Reynolds and sub-grid-scale (SGS) stresses were modelled. These models consisted of k–ɛ, Smagorinksy-Lilly, SGS turbulence kinetic energy (kSGS ), dynamic SGS and wall-adapting local eddy-viscosity (WALE) which implemented in Open FOAM. The simulation was carried out to compare against the experiment in literatures which gave a high Reynolds number of 15,500. The simulation results showed that the k–ɛ model provided the best prediction of the turbulent flow over a passive disturbance and BFS. The absence of rib was carried out to compare with the presence of the rib. It was found that the rib positions had affected to flow reattachment behind the BFS.

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