Go With The Flow

This Final Design Review (FDR) report outlines the Fuel System Flow Analysis senior project completed by the presenters listed. Included is research about Solar Turbines’ needs, and objectives for our project, our design decision process and final design, manufacturing, design verification report, final results, and suggestions moving forward with this experiment. The goal of the project is to identify stable pressure fields throughout the Solar Turbines fuel delivery system. Specifically, the optimal placement for taking measurements downstream of the main and pilot fuel control valves. The data is used to validate the accuracy of computational fluid dynamic (CFD) models that the team created. It was determined that the pipe segments upstream of the main and pilot ball valves were stable along the length of each upstream pipe and there is no significant pressure drop after the tee joint under both flow conditions tested. Therefore, it is recommended to take pressure upstream of the tee joint and downstream of each ball valve resulting in three pressure devices instead of the four that Solar currently uses, two on the main and two on the pilot. Downstream of the ball valves the vortex length, where the flow has not recovered from the disturbance, was determined to be about 10-11.5 inches. The 2D CFD predicted a 3.5-5.2% difference from experimental values. Published research predicts a vortex length of 9 inches for similar flow conditions. The experimental data collected provides insight into the flow field and vortex length, and should be used to tune CFD models for making accurate flow predictions