NUMERICAL STUDY OF TURBULENT FLOW IN ATESLA DISC PUMP

摘要

The advantages of Tesla's bladeless turbine over the conventional bladed turbine-such as an easier manufacturing process; low cost; low noise; the ability to operate with different working fluids, including Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids; and single phase or multi-phase systems [1]-keep the design development of this device a subject of ongoing research. The first design of the Tesla turbine was presented by N. Tesla in 1913 [2]. In the 60s and 70s, a number of research groups built the Tesla device to investigate its performance (power, torque, efficiency) [3]-[6]. At the present time, the efficient design of the Tesla device is still a focus of experimental and numerical research studies [7]-[13]. In this work, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are performed to study three-dimensional turbulent compressible flow between the two corotating discs. The wide gap between the discs results in a Reynolds number of 1656, which is calculated based on the disc gap and the rotational speed of the discs. The CO_2 gas is used as a working fluid. The simulations are performed using the commercial CFD software (STAR-CCM+, SIEMENS PLM). In this study, we determined the inlet and outlet boundary conditions together with the rotational speed of the discs that make the device work as a pump. The realizable k - ε turbulence model was used. The performance parameters of the pump were assessed by considering the dimensionless flow coefficient and efficiency.