Experimental and CFD Study of a Centrifugal Fan Performance Under ANSI/AMCA Standard

Abstract

Centrifugal fans are widely employed for several technical applications in science and engineering due to their easy employment and practical use. Therefore, in this work, the centrifugal airfoil performance has been studied with experimental and computational fluid dynamics techniques in order to improve their energy efficiency influenced by the rotor-stator interaction. In this sense, this research proposes a study of the main components' aerodynamic performance in order to determine the optimal operating conditions for different geometries of the impeller blades. In order to validate the simulation results, an experimental study has been performed to configure the design of experiments with the data acquisition of velocity and pressure values of the air mass flow under different conditions in the test bench configured with the ANSI/AMCA 210-07 standard. The experimental procedure has been performed with 2500 rpm, like a constant value of the centrifugal fan's angular velocity. The experimentally acquired data have allowed validation and the definition of each treatment's response to establish a linear regression model in order to predict centrifugal fan performance under different working conditions. 5.4 kPa has been determined as the high static pressure value for different impeller blade configurations conformed by the blades' angle, number, and length features.