Designing an Ultrasonic Wind Tunnel with a Steam Ejector System of Combined Cycle Power Plants

In this article, the idea of building a supersonic wind tunnel has been provided that uses a high-pressure steam flow of a combined cycle power plant. This has been investigated by CFD method. Using the plant's output steam as a high-pressure source can be used in the ejector to create supersonic airflow in the test chamber. For this purpose, first, the numerical model has been validated in comparison with the previous numerical and experimental results. The numerical model used is the viscous compressible flow, which is performed by the k-ω-SST turbulent modeling of the turbulence model. All calculations are performed in ANSYS-FLUENT software. After validating the numerical process, various geometries have been proposed to achieve the ultrasonic secondary flow and each structure is examined numerically separately in a range of functional conditions. Through trial and error method and looking at the achievements of previous research, in a very long process and by testing several different structures, a suitable structure has been obtained to achieve the supersonic testing chamber. This structure has been studied parametrically under different functional conditions. It has been shown that the proposed structure can generate an ultrasonic flow in an acceptable range of power plant steam flow and pressure. This structure has been proposed for the first time in the literature in this field, and in no previous research has such a structure been proposed. Access to the ultrasonic secondary flow is also a major innovation of this research.