Experimental and numerical investigation of circularly lobed ejector with bend mixers

The vent pipe for a turbo shaft engine may be required to have a lobed nozzle installed and to bend for the purpose of infrared stealth. The experimental setup was a circular 12‐lobed nozzle with bend mixers to study the effects on the pumping performance of the lobed bend mixer parameters. The experimental results show that the pumping ratio of the secondary mass flow to the primary mass flow for a mixer bend angle equal to 40^° is the same as that for the same lobed nozzle with the same diameter cylindrical mixer that was used in the author's previous papers. There is a great decrease of the pumping ratio for a mixer bend angle larger than 40^°. The higher the bend angles, the lower the pumping ratios. The pumping ratios initially increase and then decrease with the increasing of the cross‐area ratio of mixer to lobe. The optimal cross‐area ratio that corresponds to the maximum pumping ratio is strangely nearly equal to the optimal cross‐area ratio of a cylindrical mixer, although the maximum pumping ratio is less than that for a cylindrical mixer. The pumping ratios increase approximately linearly with the cross‐area ratio of the secondary inlet to the lobed nozzle. To investigate the flow characteristics and the pumping ratio changing mechanism, the flow field inside the ejector is numerically simulated. The numerical results show that the main reason for the great decrease of the pumping ratio when the mixer bend angle is larger than 40^° is due to the great static pressure around the bend part, which is caused by the primary flow jet. The great static pressure around the bend section chokes back the exhausted secondary fluid flow. There is a good agreement between the calculated and the measured wall static pressure coefficients in the mixer wall along the lobe crest symmetry plane of the lobed ejector. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Heat Trans Asian Res, 36(7): 387–397, 2007; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/htj.20175