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Technical Paper

Prediction of the Efficiency of an Automotive Oil Separator: Comparison of Numerical Simulations with Experiments

2004-10-25
2004-01-3019
RENAULT has developed a numerical method for predicting the efficiency of two types of oil separator. Numerical simulation is performed with the CFD package FLUENT6. Blow-by flow is considered as an aerosol mixture and is simulated as a continuous phase (air flow) carrying a discrete phase (oil droplets). The separator is meshed using a uniform 1mm tetrahedral mesh. The inlet volume flow is assumed steady. A standard k-epsilon model is used for flow calculation. Then droplets are introduced and their trajectories are computed. The wall boundary condition is straightforward: a particle touching a wall is assumed trapped and removed from the flow. The experimental set-up for efficiency measurement includes an oil generator which produces an air/oil aerosol mixture with a user-fixed volume flow, oil mass-flow and oil droplets diameter distribution. The generator is connected to a prototype oil separator. It is equipped with length and position-adjustable plates.
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