A New Angle of View for Understanding and Evaluating Flow Characteristics of Cyclic Regenerators

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A New Angle of View for Understanding and Evaluating Flow Characteristics of Cyclic Regenerators

Luo, Ercang

Abstract Regenerators represent a crucial element of regenerative machines, where their flow characteristics have a strong impact on performance. Therefore, relatively extensive measurements on flow characteristics of regenerators have been made in recent years. These measurements have shown that the flow friction factors of regenerators under reciprocating flow are much larger than those under steady flow, sometimes larger by 2∼6 times. Some of these measurement observations are true, but there are uncertainties about the evaluation methods behind others. Usually, these papers evaluated the flow friction factors of cyclic regenerators based on the view of steady flow, in which the pressure drop across the regenerator is caused only by the viscous effect of the fluid. As a result, the pressure drop was treated as a scalar quantity having the same phase as the velocity in the regenerator; in addition, the effects of inertia were usually neglected. In this paper, a new perspective for understanding and evaluating the flow characteristics in reciprocating-flow regenerators is proposed. Here, the inertia effect will be included, and the pressure drop is considered as a vector. In addition, the unusual increase of the pressure drop in the reciprocating-flow regenerator may result from early triggering or intensification of turbulence and entrance effects of the reciprocating flow in the complex geometry structure. The presented viewpoint may provide some new insights into the essence of the flow characteristics in reciprocating-flow regenerators.