I.K.; “The CFD Analysis of a Screw Compressor Suction Flow

Dynamic flow losses in the suction chamber play a very important if not the main role in the efficiency decrease in screw compressors. The design of these machines, together with the accounting of flow losses and how to reduce them, is still based only on the simple analysis. Since Computational Fluid Mechanics offers today a more accurate estimation of the velocity, pressure, temperature and concentration fields within the screw compressor, such studies can be thus extended to design a suction port with the minimized flow losses. This paper presents application of a CFD procedure to calculate a screw compressor suction flow. The numerical grid of a suction chamber is generated by a 2-D transfinite interpolation combined with the layer meshing technique both facilitated by use of an independent and stand-alone interface program which connects a screw compressor geometry with a conventional numerical pre-processor. The calculation is applied to the oil-flooded screw compressor and obtained with Comet, a commercial CFD solver