Abstract :

When Running On The Ground, Taxiing, Taking Off, Or Flying At Low Speeds, The Airflow Across The Cylinder Fins, Oil Cooler, And Accessory Case Isnt Enough To Cool The Pistons And Turbines Of An Aircooled Aircraft. This Is Especially True For Rotorcraft That Hover For Long Periods Of Time. Consequently, A Specialized Axial Cooling Fan Is Often Used In These Setups. The Thermal Margin Of The Whole Engine Installation Is Determined By Its Pressure-flow Characteristic, Which Is The Static Pressure Increase It Can Withstand At A Given Rotational Speed And Volumetric Flow. A Sixteen-blade Axial Engine Cooling Fan With A Spinner, Hub, And A Row Of Blades With A Circular Pattern Is Described In This Work, Along With Its Computational Fluid Dynamics Analysis And Solid Modeling. A Single Blade Profile Was Arranged Around The Hub Axis At 22.5° Spacing Using The Circular Pattern Function In CATIA V5s Sketcher And Part Design Workbenches To Model The Rotor. The Finished Geometry Was Then Imported Into ANSYS Workbench And Solved Using The Fluid Flow (CFX) System. Separated By A Fluid-fluid Interface, The Fluid Domain Was Discretized Into A Combined Tetrahedral Mesh Of 25,163 Nodes And 133,334 Elements, With The Inner Area Including The Spinner And Hub And The Outer Region Containing The Blades And The Surrounding Flow Field. With No-slip Walls, An Average Static Pressure At The Outlet, And An Input Velocity Of 65 M/s, A Stationaryframe, Steady-state, Laminar Solution Was Found For Air. In Spite Of Falling Short Of The Nominal 1 × 10⁻⁴ Objective, The Solver Achieved Its 100-iteration Limit With RMS Residuals Plateauing Between Around 7 × 10⁻⁴ And 2.6 × 10⁻³. Normalized Mass And Momentum Imbalances Stayed Below 0.04% Throughout, Suggesting A Rather Cautious Solution That Has Not Completely Converged. The Resultant Flow Pattern Displayed A Static-pressure Gradient Across The Fan Ranging From About -7.18 KPa To +5.58 KPa, With Local Velocities Reaching 110 M/s Close To The Blade Tips. Over And Above The Corresponding Viscous Force And Moment Components, There Was A Dominant Axial Pressure Force Of About 476 N And An Axial Pressure Moment Of About -143.5 N·m. Along With The CATIA Geometry, These Findings Define The Pressure Increase And Axial Thrust Supplied By The Fan Under The Simulated Situation. They Also Serve As A Foundation For Future Structural, Turbulence-resolved, And Rotatingframe Analyses Of The Cooling-fan Assembly. In Order To Improve The Accuracy Of The Analysis, We Point Out The Shortcomings In The Mesh Quality, The Solver Convergence, And The Assumptions Made About The Flow Regime, And We Suggest Specific Solutions.

Published:

31-7-2026

Issue:

Vol. 26 No. 7 (2026)

Page Nos:

1515 - 1522

Section:

Articles

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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