Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 September 2013
For using the swirling jet for air conditioning and heating in the premises, knowledge of the thermal characteristics is more than necessary. It is for this objective that the experimental and numerical study was realized. To conduct this study, we designed and built an experimental facility to ensure proper conditions of confinement in which we placed five air blowing devices with adjustable vanes, providing multiple swirling turbulent jet with a swirl number S = 0.4. The jets were issued in the same direction and the same spacing defined between them. This study concerned the numerical simulation of the thermal mixing of confined swirling multi-jets, and examined the influence of important parameters of a swirl diffuser system on the performance characteristics. The experimental measurements are also realized for a confined domain, aiming to determine the axial and radial temperature field. The CFD investigations are carried out by an unstructured mesh to discretize the computational domain. In this work, the simulations have been performed using the finite volume method and FLUENT solver, in which the standard k-ε, K-ε realizable, k-ε RNG and the RSM turbulence model were used for turbulence computations. The validation shows that the K-ε RNG model can be used to simulate this case successfully.