Investigation of CFD simulation based on different turbulence models in a Split-type Air Conditioner Outdoor Unit

This paper presents numerical simulation of the inner flow field of the air conditioner outdoor unit Computational domain with different two-equationturbulence models. The flow field in the outdoor set issimulated with the CFD software FLUENT. GAMBIT software with tetrahedral unstructured cells has beenused to discretize the computational domain. A porous media model is computationally efficient for heat exchanger calculations. The results were performedbased on five turbulence models in seven angular velocity and validated with the experimental results from catalog based on the exit volume rate of the outdoor set. This validations show that maximum and minimum of the average difference percent are 10.864and 7.612 for turbulence models k–ω SST and k–εRealizable, respectively. All turbulence models show the vortices around the tip of the fan in high angularvelocity; however the magnitude of these vortices is different. It can be said that SST k–ω and RNG k–ε models cannot model the vortices around the tip of the fan in low angular velocity.

Keywords:

CFD simulation , Different turbulence models , Porous media , Split-type air Conditioner , Outdoor unit , Axial flow fan