The Impact of the Gas Temperature and of the Relative Humidity on the Performance of Fans Operating in Drying Plants

In order to investigate the impact of the gas temperature and its relative humidity on the performance of fans, the similarity laws for fans were extended and verified and numerical computations with the commercial CFD solver ANSYS CFX were performed. First the accuracy of the original fan laws was verified for different operating conditions. In a second step the influence of the temperature on the fan characteristics was investigated. Finally, to include the effect of the relative humidity multiphase simulations with air and water vapor were performed. Therefore, the relative humidity was analyzed for different gas temperatures. In such a way the full influence of the temperature and of the relative humidity on the performance characteristics of radial fans operating in drying plants was obtained. These numerical results have been analyzed in detail and compared with the results predicted by the presented extended similarity laws for turbomachines.