MS Defense by Zhihang Liu

Zhihang Liu
(Advisor: Prof. Lakshmi Sankar)

will defend a master’s thesis entitled,

Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulation

Of Three-Dimensional Parallel Jets Flow

On

Wednesday, November 21th at 1:00 p.m.
Montgomery Knight Building 325

Abstract

High-speed air jets are often used in industry for manufacturing thin fibers through a process known as melt-blowing (MB). In melt blowing, high-velocity gas streams impinge upon molten strands of polymer to produce fine filaments. For a very high quantity of fibers to be produced, many small-scale jets placed side by side are needed, these jets draw the air from the same compressed air storage tank, so the fiber formation is critically dependent on the aerodynamics of the impingement jet flow field. However, the real-word MB devices always have complicate internal structures such as mixing chambers and air channels between air tank and die tip, which may cause instability and cross flow in the jet flow filed and had a significant impact on the formation of fibers and nonwoven webs with small scale jets. The purpose of this study was inspired by the necessity to understand the effect of the internal geometry on the jet flow filed and tried to prevent the flow instability with fluctuation reduction devices. The MB process in this study was modeled as a pair of two jets placed at an angle of approximately 60 degrees to each other, and when there are many such jet pairs, a stream so that multiple streams of fibers may be simultaneously produced. All internal structures of the MB device were modeled based on US Patent 6,972,104 B2 by Haynes et al. The flow field resulting from the two similar converging-plane jet nozzles was investigated using a computational fluid dynamics approach. The case in which there are flow fluctuation reduction devices installed and the case without the devices installed were studied. The k-ω turbulence model was used, and the model parameters were calculated according to the inlet conditions of the air flow.  This study consists of three parts: (a) a baseline case without any flow fluctuation reduction devices was studied to understand the mechanism of the instability and to investigate the details of the internal flow filed; (b) a wired mesh screen was placed between the air plates and the die tip, to study the effect on both the velocity and pressure distribution across the screen; (c) a honeycomb installed near the exit of last mixing chamber trying to reduce the velocity across the flow direction and turbulent intensity. Finally, the effect of the two different flow fluctuation reduction devices was compared in detail using time series measurements and time average flow contours.

Committee

  • Prof. Lakshmi N Sankar – School of Aerospace Engineering (advisor)
  • Prof. Jechiel Jagoda – School of Aerospace Engineering
  • Prof. Edmond Chow – School of Computational Science and Engineering

Event Details

Date/Time:

  • Wednesday, November 21, 2018
    1:00 pm - 3:00 pm

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