Characterization and Control for the Laminar Flow of Liquid Polyurethane System in a Wide Angle Diffuser with Transversely Arrayed Obstacles

In the manufacturing process of hard-board poly-urethane foams, the uniformity is a very important issue for the raw compound of the liquid poly-urethane system flow for the quality control of such products. One of the universal methods to generate more uniform flow is that some obstacles are located inside the diffuser at the end of injector. For the regime of non-Newtonian laminar flow, better flow uniformity can be achieved with the enhancement of mixing in the wake after the resistive obstacles. In this research, the parametric study is made for the gap interval between adjacent obstacle components as well as the cross-sectional shape with a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique. The flow fields around circular and elliptic cylinders are visualized for flow velocity and vorticity with the comparison of root-mean-square (RMS) error for the deviation of velocity at the outlet as a lumped parameter to estimate flow uniformity and mixing. When the blockage ratio is fixed 0.3 for the pipe of Reynolds number 58.5 based on its diameter, eliminating the effect of wall boundary ratio with the classical Blasius velocity profile, the RMS error is reduced 77% to 92% from the baseline case in the case of 60%-diameter gaps for the figure of circles and 2:1 longitudinal ellipse, respectively. The flow is visualized around obstacle components with vorticity as well as flow velocity where the three-dimensional components of vorticity vector are also elucidated in physics for the evolution of complex multi-dimensional flow wake.