Numerical Study of Pressure Drop in Stirling Engine Regenerator
Publication: Journal of Energy Engineering
Volume 146, Issue 4
Abstract
The regenerator of a -type Stirling engine is simulated with computational fluid dynamics. Emphasis is given to the drop in pressure caused by friction during gas flow through the regenerator matrix. The primary results include the temporal variation of the mass-flow rate and velocity in different levels of the regenerator. A time interval of between 5% and 10% of the engine cycle was found, during which gas is flowing inward to or outward from the regenerator from both its sides. Both gas velocity and pressure drop per unit length is found to increase in hotter sections. The friction factor is extracted and correlated with Reynolds number. Furthermore, two correction factors are applied to the coefficients of viscous and inertial resistance of the Ergun equation. Finally, the temporal and spatial change of the pressure drop is examined for the studied engine. An equation that well estimates the value of the pressure drop for a given time and regenerator length is presented. The derived equation can be used as input data to improve a simple analytical model.
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Data Availability Statement
The model used in the work presented in the paper is an ANSYS Fluent setup. There is no code available, but the setup parameters can be provided by the author if requested. It must be noted, however, that most of the setup parameters are defined and listed in the paper. The derived correlations are a result of the editing of the data produced by the simulation. The files representing the way of this editing can be provided upon request.
Acknowledgments
The authors Panagiotis Bitsikas and George Dogkas would like to thank the National Technical University of Athens for the financial support in the form of scholarship.
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Published In
Journal of Energy Engineering
Volume 146 • Issue 4 • August 2020
Copyright
©2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Sep 11, 2019
Accepted: Feb 26, 2020
Published online: May 21, 2020
Published in print: Aug 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Oct 21, 2020
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