Effects of inlet radius and bell mouth radius on flow rate and sound quality of centrifugal blower

The effect of inlet radius and bell mouth radius on flow rate of centrifugal blower were numerically simulated using a commercial CFD program, FLUENT. In this research, a total of eight numerical models were prepared by combining different values of bell mouth radii and inlet radii (the cross section of bell mouth was chosen as a circular arc in this research). The frozen rotor method combined with a realizable k-epsilon turbulence model and non-equilibrium wall function was used to simulate the three-dimensional flow inside the centrifugal blowers. The inlet radius was then revealed to have significant impact on flow rate with the maximum difference between analyzed models was about 4.5% while the bell mouth radius had about 3% impact on flow rate. Parallel experiments were carried out to confirm the results of CFD analysis. The CFD results were thereafter validated owning to the good agreement between CFD results and the parallel experiment results. In addition to performance analysis, noise experiments were carried out to analyze the dependence of sound quality on inlet radius and bell mouth radius with different flow rate. The noise experiment results showed that the loudness and sharpness value of different models were quite similar, which mean the inlet radius and the bell mouth radius didn’t have a clear impact on sound quality of centrifugal blower.