A study of pressure-driven flow in a vertical duct near two current-carrying wires using finite volume technique

Abstract

For heating, ventilation or air conditioning purposes in massive multistory building constructions, ducts are a common choice for air supply, return, or exhaust. Rapid population expansion, particularly in industrially concentrated areas, has given rise to a tradition of erecting high-rise buildings in which contaminated air is removed by making use of vertical ducts. For satisfying the enormous energy requirements of such structures, high voltage wires are used which are typically positioned near the ventilation ducts. This leads to a consequent motivation of studying the interaction of magnetic field (MF) around such wires with the flow in a duct, caused by vacuum pump or exhaust fan etc. Therefore, the objective of this work is to better understand how the established (thermally and hydrodynamically) movement in a perpendicular square duct interacts with the MF formed by neighboring current-carrying wires. A constant pressure gradient drives the flow under the condition of uniform heat flux across the unit axial length, with a fixed temperature on the duct periphery. After incorporating the flow assumptions and dimensionless variables, the governing equations are numerically solved by incorporating a finite volume approach. As an exclusive finding of the study, we have noted that MF caused by the wires tends to balance the flow reversal due to high Raleigh number. The MF, in this sense, acts as a balancing agent for the buoyancy effects, in the laminar flow regime