Advances in numerical analysis of ranque-hilsch vortex tube: A review.

The Ranque–Hilsch vortex tube is a device which divides a flow of compressed air or gas into two different streams of fluid, a hot and a cold stream of air or gas. After the innovation of the vortex tube in 1933, there has been a massive amount of literature on the topic. Many researchers around the world are interested to enhance the performance of vortex tube. Since the device is very simple, lightweight, and noiseless, it does not use any traditional refrigerants like Freon, also it does not have any mechanical moving parts, the vortex tube is well-suited a variety of industrial settings, including cooling applications like lubricants in CNC machines, drier, refrigerators, medical cooling and biological applications, desalination, automated spot cooler and heating processes, traditional machining processes among others. This article represents a review on Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube and focuses light on three aspects. In the first section it describes the introduction concepts and the constructional details. The second section describes about the mechanisms that dominates the phenomena of energy separation within the tube and discusses about some popular theories. The third section discusses about the recent advancements in the direction of numerical analysis of vortex tube along with the design parameters, the numerical tools along with the models and their key findings. The discussion and the conclusion will help the designers to further increase the performance of the device which will capable it to be adoptable in any cooling and refrigeration applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]