Paper presented to the 10th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Florida, 14-16 July 2014.
In this paper, we take two important steps to analyse hydropneumatic
systems and their components. In this regard, we
first extend a new all-speed approach to solve the full onedimensional
Navier-Stokes equations. The extended approach
can be equally used to simulate both gas and liquid flows,
considering an equivalent gas constant for the latter case. We
further apply the extended approach to analyse both liquid
water and air flows through two separate hydro-pneumatic
circuits. To verify the accuracy of our solution, we compare our
solutions with those of Lax-Wendroff method. The comparison
shows that the current proposed all-speed algorithm provides
solutions with excellent accuracy. One important advantage of
this new extended algorithm is in treating the two-phase fluid
flow problems, where there are mixed liquid water and vapour
behaviours, e.g., diaphragm pumps. Therefore, as a second
contribution, we simulate a multi-component diaphragm pump,
whose parts consist of check valves, signal subsystems,
conveys, and air distribution system. As a final step, we obtain
the limit of cavitation temperature at the suction side of the
check valve for a sample diaphragm pump.
