The Burning Need for Modeling

Gianluca Argentini
Riello Burners
Legnago, Italy

Riello Burners manufactures high-efficiency low maintenance burners for use in residential and commercial heating applications, as well as in industrial processes. Proper ventilation is crucial for a burner because it maintains appropriate air flow into the combustion head where the flame is located.

When designing the fan for any burner, there must be a balance between a configuration which obtains high values of static pressure and flow of air and a configuration maintaining high mechanical efficiency, meaning it requires less electricity to run.

Using COMSOL Multiphysics, Riello Burners can model their new designs and simulate the air flow of the fans before testing prototypes. This has cut time spent in the testing phase from the year it would take to test tens of geometries down to one month (compared to a year). In the future, they hope to use COMSOL to optimize design for minimization of energy loss, noise, and vibrations.

Streamlines showing the velocity into the impeller and the velocity into the housing

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