High Pressure Fan Design for Biogas Plants

Abstract

High pressure fans for thermal power generation stations, especially biogas plants, usually operate in a spiral casing at high pressures of about p = 12.000–15.000 Pa and low flow rates of around Q = 100–600 m3/s. The motor drive has a constant speed of 3.000 l/min. This corresponds to specific speeds of nq = 3–6 min−1, which is already beyond the conventional range of single stage radial machines. Nowadays these fans for biogas plants usually operate at higher flow rates than specified or are multiple stage radial fans. Therefore a new class of radial impellers has been developed. These single stage impellers have a unique high pressure at a low flow rate operating point. In this work several impellers of this new class have been designed and validated with a commercial Navier-Stokes solver (ANSYS CFX). The design process is described in detail. It is based on a new extended analytical and numerical design method. It is shown that the prescribed unusual operating point can be achieved with single stage radial impellers. An in detail flow analysis is given showing the fundamental flow physics of these impellers.