Investigation of the thermal separation in a counter-flow Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube with regard to different fin geometries located inside the cold-tube length

A Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube is a mechanical device in absence of any portable part or work input and significantly separates the inlet gas stream into hot and cold gas which provides a variety of applications. Current research consists a three-dimensional numerical model at steady state condition using installed fins on cold tube. Six different geometry were chosen for fins including triangle, square, rectangle, circle, parallelogram and trapezium. The outcome data of the research then is verified with compare to prior experiment results brought in literature. This article surveys the influence of different fin shapes on critical performance parameters of cold temperature difference, hot temperature difference, isentropic efficiency and COP numerically. The modeling results indicate that the parallelogram and rectangular fins have the highest and lowest cold temperature difference, isentropic efficiency and COP, respectively. It was also observed that the greatest COP and efficiency happens at pressure loss ratio equal to 0.65 at which, the optimum performance parameters of parallelogram fin for cold temperature difference, hot temperature difference, isentropic efficiency and COP were 35, 35.3, 0.279 and 33 respectively; whereas, these parameters were 30, 30, 0.255 and 23.9 for rectangular fin, respectively.