2010 International Conference on Mechanical and Electrical Technology (ICMET 2010)

Influencing Factors of CFD Simulation Precision for the Emitter Channel

4 ' 3 Xin Zhang , Guangyong Li , and Yipeng Ma College of Water Conservancy and Civil Engineering China Agricultural University Beijing 100083, China E-mail: zhangxin@cau.edu.cn 2

Dongmei Wang

Shanghai Iinshan Water Resources Management Institute Shanghai 201500 E-mail: dongmei0904@163.com

Abstract---CFD simulation can largely reduce the workload for

molding, processing and measuring in the emitter development. However, as the emitter flow typically sits between conventional-scale flow and micro-scale flow, the influencing factors of CFD simulation precision are not clear yet. To address this issue, six types of emitter labyrinth channels were made for this study. By comparing the measuring results with the simulation results generated by Fluent, the influence factors of simulation precision were analyzed. The study showed that near wall treatment does not affect simulation precision under the standard model. For emitters with small flow rate, where the ratio of mesh size to minimum channel size is less than 1/6, simulation results are irrelevant to mesh size.

In order to find the key factors impacting the simulation precision of the flow in the CFD and their corresponding treatments, the six developed emitter labyrinth channels were built, simulated, and analyzed by comparing with measured hydraulic parameters in this paper. II.
A.
MATERIALS AND METHODS

Structural Parameters of Emitter Flow-passage

Keywords-Drip

irrigation;

emitter;

labyrinth

channels;

CFD; simulation precision; influence factor.

The basic unit of the planar structure design on various labyrinth flow passages is generally triangle. Figure 1 describes the definition of related structural parameters. These parameters (dentation width, interdentation space, dentation height, dentation angle and channel length, etc) determine the different type of dentation and emitter.

I.

INTRODUCTION

Emitter is one of the key components in the drip irrigation system. The internal flow pattern largely depends on the structure of flow-passage, which defines the emitter hydraulic performance [1]. Traditionally, plenty of time and money has to be spent on the repeated designs and experiments for, due to the complicated but minute structure of various labyrinth emitters. Modern advances on CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) provide an efficient and economic way of numerical simulation for design and optimizing the complex flow-passage. This largely reduces the workload for molding, processing and measuring in the emitter development. In recent studies, scholars used CFD commercial software Fluent to simulate emitter's hydraulic performance under various discharge design [2-4]. The simulation on the motion law of solid particles in the labyrinth channels also was researched by method of liquid solid two phase flow in the CFD [5,6]. Although a number of scholars proved the feasibility of CFD simulation through laboratory experiments and the particle image velocity method (PIV) [4,6,7], the impact of the simulation bias caused by wall treatment, mesh size and other geometric parameters was not clear yet. As an evidence, a large number of experiments validated that the critical Reynolds number of the emitter flow-passage is far less than that of straight pipe flow pattern, primarily due to the complexity of channel design and the fact that the size of flow-passage lies between micro and large-scale.

I oll
a: dentation width, b: dentation bottom width, h: dentation height, I: interdentation space, W: minimwn channel width, 8: dentation angle. H: channel width

Figure 1.

Emitter flow-passage diagram and structural parameters.

B.

Model Structure

The emitter samples include six labyrinth channels with different dentation profiles which were designed originally and then processed. The characteristic structural parameters satisfy demands of anti-clogging per romance [8]. The structure parameters are shown in Table 1.

978-1-4244-8102-6/10/$26.00 CO 2010 IEEE

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2010 International Conference on Mechanical and Electrical Technology (ICMET 2010)

TABLEr.

THE STRUCTURAL PARAMETERS OF DRIP EMITTERS TESTED

C.

CFD Simulation

Emitter Samples
EI -I E I -2 E2- 1 E2-2 E3- 1 E3-2

Structural Parameters (mm)

a

b
0.85 0.85 0.85 0.85 0.85 0.9

h
0.78 0.78 0.75 0.75 0.8 0.8

H
1.2 1.2 1. 1 1 1. 17 1.2 1.24

D
0.55 0.55 0.55 0.6 0.6 0.6 1.45 1.45 1.45 1.45 1.45 1.65

L
46 39 46 46 46 46

0.6 0.6 0.6 0.6 0.6 0.75

0.55 0.55 0.5 0.53 0.5 0.5

The hydraulic characteristics of the emitter are typically represented by Q =kW (I)

where Q is dripper discharge, Lih. The rated flow is defined as the dripper discharge under the rated operating pressure (lOOkPa); k is flow coefficient, depending on the size and shape of the flow-passage; H is working pressure, kPa; x is flow pattern index, reflecting the sensitivity of the dripper discharge to the pressure. The smaller the x, the more uniform the effluent is. The flow is in fully turbulent pattern when the x is greater or equal to 0.5. The hydraulic performance of the sample emitters are obtained by experiments, as shown in Table 2. The experimental equipment, located in the Irrigation and Drainage Laboratory of the China Agricultural University, was an integrated test system for hydraulic performance and anti-clogging performance [1, 8]. The experiments based on the Agricultural irrigation equipment - technical specifications and testing methods for drip irrigation (GBIT17188-1997). At least 25 emitters were involved in each test, under the pressure of 100Kpa. The volume method was adopted by taking the discharge as the average of the 25 emitters.
TABLE II.
HYDRAULIC PARAMETERS UNDER THE RATED WORKING PRESSURE

The software Fluent is based on the classical Navier Stokes equation and the continuity equation, which is used widely in the large-scale area, such as aviation, heat transfer, and flow passage components of turbine. Recent studies showed that the hydraulic performance of the micro-scale flow-passage is basically the same as predicted value of the classical Navier-Stokes model [9]. Emitter flow within the flow-passage is not the typical conventional-scale flow, nor does it fully manifest as micro-scale flow. The size of flow section in the emitter mentioned is tiny (0.5-1.3mm), sitting between micro-scale (characteristic scale 1.0!ffi1 1.0mm) and regular size (>Imm). Thus, it is feasible to establish the mathematical model of fluid flow within the labyrinth passage based on the classical Navier-Stokes equation and the continuity equation. Note that the flow in the flow passage can be regarded as incompressible fluid (p constant). And the plastic tube wall should be treated as non-absolute rigid. Therefore, non-coupled implicit solution method is employed in this study. Specifically, the momentum equations, turbulent kinetic energy and dissipation rate are discretized by the first order upwind scheme, while the Pressure-Velocity coupling is calculated by the SIMPLEC solution. The tolerance was set 0.0001 as the simulation convergence.
=

III.

RESULTS AND ANALYSIS

The accuracy of the CFD simulation for the emitter flow-passage is evaluated by the deviation between the simulated results and the actual measuring results. (Our study focused on the two key factors that might influence the simulation-precision of CFD, namely the near-wall treatment, mesh size / pattern. Meanwhile, we put aside factors like the test device, the pressure meter range, and other artificial ones that could also influence the measurement of the emitter flow. The computational domain is the labyrinth channels of the emitters.
A.
Influence from Near-wall Treatment

Type of Dentation
standard
EI

Emitter Samples
EI - I EI-2 E2- 1 E2-2 E3- 1 E3-2

Hydraulic Performance Parameters Q

(Lh')
1.299 1.4 18 1.239 1.467 1.468 1.63
x

k
0. 1 124 0. 1252 0. 1005 0. 125 1 0. 1 19 0. 1329

Re*
6 14.6 599.4 665.5 868.9 757.7 998.7

The critical Re is greatly reduced in micro flow-passage with complex geometry [5]. It is easy to change the flow pattern from laminar to turbulent with complicated structure in the labyrinth channels, so the stable outflow rate can be obtained after the fully energy dissipation. This also implies that the turbulence model would be a reasonable and scientific choice in simulating the tiny-flow field.

0.5307 0.5263 0.545 0.5387 0.5447 0.5437

inclined E2 rightangled E3

*Re is obtained from the minimwn cross section of the flow-passage lUlder 100KPa pressure.

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2010 International Conference on Mechanical and Electrical Technology (ICMET 2010)

Figure 3.

Velocity distributions in the flow-passage corresponding to the two treatments.

2.:'

a:lstandard wall treatment _enhanced wall treatment Dmeasured

3.07.O' l.S4t.04

(a) Standard wall treatment

ID ID D D ID ID Elnitff'1' SlInl)lf's

Figure 4.

Comparison of the simulated flow and the measured flow in different channels and treatments.

6.1".003

(b) Enhanced wall treatment Figure 2. Pressure distributions in the flow-passage corresponding to the two treatments.

The Standard k-s model is a typical two-equation turbulence model. It is simple, stable, precise and most widely used for the turbulent flow with high Re (Re> 1500). In the case of low-Re flow, the enhanced wall treatment is typically adopted. As the cross section of the emitter flow passage changes greatly along the way with some parts in the low-Re region, both the standard wall treatment and enhanced wall treatment are adopted in this study for comparison. Surprisingly, the two models have little effect on the distributions of pressure and velocity, as shown in Fgure 2 and 3. Their influence on the simulation precision is shown in Figure 4. The influence of two wall treatment on simulation precision is not distinct under the standard k E model, with the flow deviation ranges from 0.2% to 4.3%.
-

3.66.000 3.47.000

3.09.000 01.89.000
:uo...oo

3.31.000 3.13.000

"' ;-:I"\ r'.J

B.

Influence from Mesh Size

3.860-01 1.93e-Ol 3.830-04

(a) Standard wall treatment

3.40.000 3.33.00

a,Slt,CO

The mesh size is one of the important factors to evaluate the quality of the mesh. And the quality of the CFD mesh, in its turn, has a major impact on the calculation accuracy and efficiency. Fluent provides many flexible mesh forms including triangle, quadrilateral, tetrahedron, hexahedron, etc, which are suitable for complex boundary flow. The hybrid unstructured mesh can also be used with customized settings. Due to the complex structure and the micro magnitude of the flow-passage in the emitter, this paper adopted the hybrid meshes to handle the possible large influence from mesh generation at the corner of the flow passage. Generally, the quality of simulation will be improved if the mesh is consistent with the flow direction. In this paper, Gambit, the pre-processor of Fluent was used to generate the mesh. Apparently, the mesh size is negatively related to the mesh number for a certain channel. The general setting of mesh size is O.lmm [7]. As the mesh size reduced from O.lmm to 0.08mm to 0.05mm, the mesh number grows from over 10 million to over 80 million to over 320 million. And the simulation time increases from five hours to 20 hours. Figure 5 shows the mesh size, the corresponding velocity

:iI.ISt.CO

1.35.000

(b) Enhanced wall treatment

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2010 International Conference on Mechanical and Electrical Technology (ICMET 2010)

vector shown in Figure 6, and the results of the simulated and the measured flow were shown in Figure 7.

(c) O.OSmm mesh size Figure 6. Comparison of velocity vector of three mesh sizes for the standard dentation channels.

(a) O.lmm mesh size

1.8
1.6

Cmesh 0.1 Omesh 0.05 Omesh 0.08

'1.4
1 ...
(b) O.08mm mesh size
...

.2
fi:

F'

.8
0.6 04 0.2 o El-l El-2

E2-1

Einittt.' S:unl)les

E2-2

E3-1

E3-2

Figure 7. The comparison between the simulated and the measured flow corresponding to the mesh size O.08mm, O.OSmm and O.lmm. (c) O.OSmm mesh size Figure S. Comparison of mesh sizes for the standard dentation channels.

As can be seen from the Figure 6, the flow core in flow passages with 0.08mm and 0.05mm meshe were almost same. Yet, for O.1mm mesh flow passage, the continuity of velocity vector was worse and disengaging phenomenon was relatively distinct when flow crossed sharp angles due to larger mesh sizes. From the Figure 7, when the flow rate of the emitter channel is within 1.32.1L/h, the mesh size are set as 0.1 and 0.08mm respectively, meanwhile, the deviation of simulation is 1.6%-5.9%; When the mesh size are set as 0.05mm and 0.08mm respectively, the deviation of simulation goes down to 0.3% -1.5%. This is already good enough, implying that further decrease of the mesh size may have little improvement on the simulation precision. In fact, when the ratio of mesh size to minimum channel size is less than 1/6, there is no distinct benefit for further refining the meshes. In this case, local mesh refinement should be adopted for the complex channels. Moreover, sharp-angles of the channel will be change into arch by electro-erosion machining [10] at sharp dentation and internal angle during manufacturing process. This deviation is significant and will discuss in another paper.

(a) O.lmm mesh size

(b) O.08mm mesh size

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2010 International Conference on Mechanical and Electrical Technology (ICMET 2010)

IV.

CONCLUSION

(1) The influence of standard and enhanced wall treatment on simulation precision is not distinct under the standard k model.
-

(2) For the emitters of the flow rate within 1.32.1L/h, the simulation deviation is 0.3%-1.5% when the mesh size is set as 0.05 and 0.08mm. Considering the computing cost, the required precision can be met when the ratio of mesh size to minimum channel size is not greater than 116.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This project was jointly supported by Chinese Universities Scientific Fund (No. 2009-2-12), "863" Program (2006AA 100214-2) and The National Key Technologies R&D Program for the 11th five-year plan (2006BAJ04B03-2).
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