(Biosystem Studies, Vol.9 No.2, pp236-246, 2007)

Numerical and Experimental Investigations on Internal Flow of Agricultural Impact Sprinklers

Haijun YAN, Kazuhiro NAKANO, Yangjun OU and Fenfen YU

Summary

A typical internal flow passage of sprinkler is composed of bearing nipple, bend, tube and nozzle. An integral 3D numerical model based on the structural characteristics of the impact sprinkler was constructed to simulate the relationship between flow rates and pressure heads by computational fluid dynamics (CFD). For this purpose, a steady flow with different mesh grid types and three turbulence models as standard, RNG and realizable has been applied to simulate in this study. The flow field distributions of internal flow at inlet pressures ranging 300-500kPa were obtained. Meanwhile, the impact sprinkler prototype was used in the flow rate experiments. The calculated results obtained revealed simulation method using RNG and realizable turbulence models and a mesh grid type generated by multi-block technique together can supply a better agreement with the experimental data.