Numerical study of flow fluctuation attenuation performance of a surge tank

The surge tank plays an important role in ensuring the stability of a water flow standard device. To study the influence of the structure and the working conditions on the regulator performance of a surge tank, a three-dimensional model, including a surge tank, the pipeline and the water tank is built, and the VOF model in the Fluent software is used to simulate the two-phase pulsatile flow in the surge tank. The inlet flow pulsation is defined by the User Defined Functions (UDF), and the outlet flow is set to be a free jet. By calculating the flow fluctuation coefficient of the variation under different flow conditions, the influences of the pulse frequency, the initial water level height and the baffle plate structure on the flow stability are analyzed. It is shown that the surge tank has a good attenuation effect on high-frequency pulsations, there is an optimal initial water level to suppress the fluctuations, the round holes of the baffle should ensure a certain circulation area with the bore diameter small enough to have the necessary damping effect.