Flow and Temperature Visualization Over Radiators of Transformer Using Experimental and Advanced CFD Simulations
4 Pages Posted: 12 Feb 2018
Date Written: December 17, 2017
Abstract
Present work is focused on air flow and thermal visualization over radiators of power transformer by experimental and advanced numerical simulations using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for ONAF (Oil Natural and Air Forced) cooling configuration. Experiments are performed on in-house radiator test facility and commercial software is used for simulations. The study is performed on a group of 5 radiators with 27 fins, and 2 fans (of 1m diameter). Good agreement, between the numerical and experimental results, is reported for air flow, temperature distribution over the radiators and heat dissipation. For air flow visualization, simple threads (thin strand of cotton) are used to understand the air leakage from the sideways of radiators for vertical air flow and for temperature distribution over the radiator surface thermography is used. It is observed that CFD predicted regions of air leakage and temperature distribution matches well with experimental results. The study is useful for transformer designers and manufacturers, to understand the air flow distribution over radiators.
Keywords: Flow Visualization, Radiator, Temperature Distribution
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