Numerical study of swirled flow aerodynamics in the vortex chamber of the combined pneumatic machine

This paper presents a numerical simulation of the aerodynamics of a swirled flow in a vortex chamber. A particular feature of this vortex chamber is the presence of rotating blades located at the top of the outlet part for the carrying agent. In addition, the dynamics of the carrying agent in the abovementioned vortex chamber with a rotating disk located in the middle part and designed to increase the circumferential velocity of the carrying agent has been investigated. The numerical investigation showed that it was possible to get a uniform profile along the height of the radial velocity at the rotor inlet. This fact is a necessary condition for the effective operation of the separator. The reliability of numerical simulation results has been confirmed by both the test study, the comparison with the well-known analytical dependence, and the comparison of the results obtained using «velocity–pressure» and «vortex-stream function» variables.