Study of tip clearance effects in centrifugal fans with unshrouded impellers using computational fluid dynamics

Performance of centrifugal fans with unshrouded impellers strongly depends upon complex configuration of the asymmetrical flowfield in the axial direction, which is highly unsteady. The flowfield, in turn, is considerably affected by the design parameters of both scroll and impeller geometry, for which tip clearance is of particular interest. This article presents a three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation of the flowfield in three different unshrouded centrifugal fan impellers with varying tip clearances. A commercial CFD code, namely, Fluent V6.2.16 with a k-ε two-equation turbulence model was utilized in order to study the effects of tip clearance on the overall performance of each fan with the tip clearances ranging from 5 to 30 mm. The numerical results were compared with the experimental data reported previously in the literature by the present author and his colleagues, and excellent agreements were observed for each fan.