Simulation of thermal and hydrodynamic behavior of a solar bubble pump

Abstract

The CFD software presents an advanced numerical tool for the simulation of monophasic and diphasic flows in heated or boiling pipes. The bubble pump, which is the driving element of the diffusion absorption machines, shows an example of the heated tubes. This article is devoted to the study of the behavior of flows in a bubble pump of a solar diffusion absorption refrigeration machine, uniformly heated along its section of length 1m and diameter 10mm, using the CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamic) software, Fluent package. This work has been realized supposing that the regime is laminar and the flow is monophasic. Numerical simulation permits to study the effect of heating flux on the temperature and flow velocity distribution. Where water, is used as a working fluid along the tube of the bubble pump. This work shows that the variation of the heating flux has no effect on the fluid velocity in the tube. However, it has an effect on the distribution of the fluid temperature along the section.