Simulation of Fluid Flow in a Distribution Manifold
In this paper, a simulation of fluid flow in a distribution manifold has been considered. An axial inlet has been taken and the variation of velocity and pressure in the header tube and the outlet tubes have been observed. The effect of various parameters such as the Area Ratio(AR) that is the ratio of header tube cross-sectional area to the sum of outlet tube cross-sectional areas and the inlet velocity on the discharge coefficient have been observed. The % ENU that is the extent of non-uniformity has been calculated for comparison of the values to achieve a uniform discharge rate. A varying area manifold was also simulated and the angle of inclination for uniform discharge has been found.
For the simulation, the geometry was built on the COMSOL Multiphysics® software. Material Water was selected from the COMSOL Multiphysics® material library. Turbulent flow(k-epsilon) physics was used for the computation. The automatic meshing was done with coarser mesh size. The results were computed for the stationary time-independent study.
