Gallery

Header Assembly

The header assembly is made out of 16 gauge sheet metal welded to 1” schedule 40 steel pipe. This configuration will direct the heated air at the test surface. Air will be exiting the header assembly at 500^oF. With the use of flow diverters the flow will become uniform and straight. The goal of this section to provide a variety of Reynolds numbers through a plate with holes drilled in it.

Exhaust Housing and Chimney

The exhaust housing is designed to keep all of the hot air contained and then direct it back to the chimney where it will be cooled to close to room temperature. The header assembly will fit inside the Exhaust Housing.

An instrumented surface will be inserted into the open end of the exhaust housing.

After the hot air has left the surface it will be directed to the chimney which.

The chimney has an duct booster fan mounted inside to mix room temperature air with the hot exhaust air. This will cool the air down so that it will not be harmful to people or other equipment.

Instrumented Surface and Adjustable Housing

There is a removable surface that is instrumented with thermocouples. The thermocouples provide the raw data from which Nusselt numbers can be calculated. The surface can be slid in and out of an adjustable housing. The adjustable housing can change the distance from the impingement jets to the instrumented surface. The surface will be removed so that the rig can warm up to operating temperatures then it will be inserted and the test run.

This picture illustrates how the surface and exhaust housing fit together.

Constructing the rig

 

While constructing the rig was a lot of fun there were quite a few challenges presented by the fact that the majority of the rig is sheet metal.