Open AccessDevelopment of a Flow Visualization Technique in Wind Tunnel for Hydrokinetic Turbine Application
Author(s) -
Abdelrahman T. Ismail,
Noorfazreena M. Kamaruddin
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
iop conference series. materials science and engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1757-899X
pISSN - 1757-8981
DOI - 10.1088/1757-899x/920/1/012034
Subject(s) - streamlines, streaklines, and pathlines , turbine , wind tunnel , marine engineering , flow visualization , flow (mathematics) , water tunnel , drag , visualization , computational fluid dynamics , reynolds number , environmental science , materials science , mechanics , aerospace engineering , mechanical engineering , engineering , physics , vortex , turbulence
A smoke wire technique was developed in a wind tunnel to visualize a drag-driven turbine flow structure for hydrokinetic application. A Nichrome wire with a diameter of 0.5 mm was initially heated and then coated with Safex oil to illustrate the streamlines that represent the turbine flow characteristics. The developed smoke wire oil coating technique was compared at airflow speeds of 3 m/s to 10 m/s to represent equivalent water flow speed corresponding to Reynolds numbers (Re) of 29, 563 to Re = 98, 543, respectively. Several parameters that influence the turbine flow patterns, such as the diameter of wire and oil coating technique, were tested in the wind tunnel to investigate the effect of these parameters to visualize the stream lines at low and high speed case. The qualitative result based on these various configurations was analyzed and discussed in this paper to identify the most practical flow visualization technique in a wind tunnel that could effectively be captured to represent the turbine flow structure for hydrokinetic application.