Infrasound Cooling of Steel Plates - Modeling and Simulation of an Acoustic Cooling System

Sammanfattning

As global steel demand continues to rise, the steel industry faces increasing pressure to reduce its energy consumption. Conventional cooling is inefficient, and novel technologies have the potential to improve these processes. One promising approach is the use of pulsating flow to enhance heat transfer during cooling of hot steel plates. In this thesis Infrasonik’s infrasound cooling solution is simulated using Computational Fluid Dynamics in the software OpenFOAM. A standing wave is established and the coupling of pressure and velocity is explored and documented. Additionally a hot plate is inserted into the domain, and the method of heat transfer from the plate to the surrounding air volume is studied. It is concluded that despite the limitations of the simulation model, using infrasound as a method of cooling in industrial applications has merit and provides a new and improved cooling solution. Making use of simplified boundary conditions in an LES based model, gave excellent qualitative results, which depict the coupling of pressure and velocity. Showing how non-linearity transfers between them, offers more insight into how the pressure driven reversal of flow works. This flow, and its reversal is shown to be able to transfer the heat from a hot plate to the air, and then mix that air which is able to be absorbed into the cooling fins of the surrounding wall. This process yielded a heat transfer rate of 70 w/m2K for a plate heated to 700 K.