The effect of actuator parameters on the critical flow velocity of a fluidic amplifier

The effect of actuator parameters on the critical flow velocity of the fluidic amplifier in liquid-jet hammers has been investigated numerically and experimentally. The flow in the fluidic amplifier and actuators coupled with the rigid body movement of the impacting body has been simulated using a commercial CFD software package, Fluent. The flow is modeled by the RNG-based kappa-epsilon turbulence model and the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. Dynamic layering method and a user-defined function written in C programming language are used to update the mesh in the simulations. The results show that, increasing the piston diameter decreases rapidly the critical flow velocity as the piston diameter is less than a certain value. The critical flow velocity increases sharply as the piston rod diameter is greater than a certain value, and increases nearly linearly with mass of the impacting body, and is independent on stroke length of the impacting body. The findings of the numerical investigations agree well with corresponding experimental results. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.