Design and Optimizing the Sea-Spray Collector using CFD

Abstract

Sea-spray contributes significantly to marine icing, posing a severe challenge to marine operations in cold regions. There are two parts to spray icing, i) amount of water impingement on marine structure, ii) thermodynamics/heat transfer governing the fraction of spray that freezes and adheres to the structure. Sea-spray collection provides means to investigate into marine icing phenomenon. In this work, a sea-spray collector is designed, inspired by the principle of a cyclone separator in the process industry. In the designed spray collector, the air-laden spray droplet enters the collector; both centrifugal and cyclonic action separates the water droplets from the air, gradually coalescing and accumulating at the bottom. From the scientific literature, particle size distribution in sea-spray ranges from 1 μm up to 7700 μm. Since the smaller particles ride the fluid streamlines, hence are more difficult to capture. Considering the above, particular emphasis was given to understanding the fluid streamlines that can be simulated using the traditional CFD method, Reynolds Average Navier Stokes (RANS) using commercial software ANSYS® Fluent. Hence it was chosen for dimensionalizing and optimizing the design features such as entrance area, nozzle shape, vortex finder, orifice size, etc.