EVALUATION OF THE FLOW INDUCED BY DIFFERENT SHROUDS GEOMETRIES

Abstract

Energy consumption continues to rise due to the increase in the quality of human life. On the other hand, production of these energies must be done with the smaller impact on the environment as possible. All these facts are challenging engineers and researchers from this domain to develop new equipments or to improve the efficiency of the energy production equipments. It was proved that in the case of turbine, if a shroud is applied, the efficiency is raised. Given that in this paper is presented a study performed on different geometry of shrouds with different fixing elements. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were performed using ANSYS Fluent software. The numerical domain rigorously reproduces an experimental set-up from the laboratory. The rectangular fixing element do not deliver the expected result, instead it decreases the velocity in interest zone. The most important finding is that the velocity of the fluid increases by more than 50% in the most constrained section with convergent-divergent shroud.