Study of the Impact of Flow Valve Design on the Temperature Separation in the Vortex Tube with Computational Approach

The vortex tube is a device which bifurcates the compressed gas into the cold and hot stream and is used as a flow separator. The shape of the hot outlet throttle influences the quality of cold outlet fluid in terms of temperature. This investigation focuses on the optimization of vortex tubes with three different models for throttle valves, namely conical, square, and truncated. ANSYS FLUENT software has been used to simulate flow, considering air as a working fluid for a steady-state, three-dimensional, axisymmetric, counter flow vortex tube. The standard k-ε turbulent model has been considered for the flow simulation. The effect of the shape of the control valve, intake pressure on temperature, and velocity flow has been studied. The truncated shape control valve shows a promising result for thermal performance enhancement among all the geometries considered. The coefficient of performance (COP) of a truncated control valve is highest compared to other models. The computational result of the present study has been validated with experimental data.