Fans operating at the edges of large-scale air-cooled steam condensers often do so under distorted inlet air flow conditions. These conditions create variations in the aerodynamic loads exerted on a fan blade during rotation which causes it to vibrate. In order to isolate the sources of the unsteady aerodynamic loads as well as their effects on blade vibration, a potential flow fluid dynamics code was written to determine the aerodynamic loads exerted on a fan blade as a function of its rotation. The lift and drag forces were exported to a finite element code approximating the fan blade as a cantilever beam. With these two sets of code the response of the blade when subjected to varying aerodynamic loads could be determined. Furthermore, the effect of changing certain parameters such as blade stiffness or damping can be investigated. It was found that the blade’s response closely resembles that which was measured at the full-scale facility and that slight changes to the blade’s stiffness can potentially reduce the vibrational amplitude but may also lead to resonance.
This paper details the design, validation and verification of two implicit modelling techniques used to model an Air-Cooled Condenser (ACC) in the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code environment of OpenFOAM (Open Source Field And Manipulation). The actuator disk model was chosen as the axial flow fan model and the heat exchanger model was implemented as an A-frame, or Delta frame, heat exchanger commonly found on power stations. Both models were validated and verified. A 30 fan ACC was verified against previous literature. The results for all validation and verification procedures showed good agreement with respective data. Three different fan configurations in an ACC were compared at different wind speeds namely the A-fan, B2a-fan and a Combined ACC. The study showed small differences between ACCs with regard to fan and thermal performance. However, the B2a-fan ACC consumed 20% less power than the A-fan ACC and 3–10% less power than the Combined ACC. This performance increase was most prominently show-cased by the increased heat-to-power ratio with the B2a-fan exhibiting heat-to-power ratios of 110 W/W compared to 96 W/W for the A-fan.
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