Investigation on the flow dynamics of mesoscale inlet guide vanes

An investigation of the flow fields of mesoscale inlet guide vanes is presented in this paper. An in depth look at the design process is also presented. The guidelines set in place for the design and manufacturing of standard equipment were utilized with discretion. The parameters that were to be achieved for these designs were to keep the inlet vanes within a 1 to 2cm tip diameter range. The difficulty with this is the manufacturability of something so small. In order to ease this problem the vanes were scaled to be twice as large as the original design size while keeping the hub the same diameter. This allowed the vanes to remain intact during the manufacturing process. After the design was completed and the parts had been manufactured a method of testing such small-scale parts was needed, so the use of a water tunnel was chosen. The water tunnel was designed specifically for these tests so qualification tests for the determination of where in the tunnel to test were performed. Three testing methods are discussed in this paper, the two methods used experimentally are a Laser Doppler Anemometer and Particle Image Velocimetry; the numerical method of Computational Fluid Dynamics, was also used for comparative purposes with the other methods. Once the testing had been completed and the analysis of the data performed, the separate test planes could be compared. Of the four test planes, only one would show evidence of all three test methods validating the other methods information