Study of a Compressed Air Vessel for Controlling the Pressure Surge in Water Networks: CFD and Experimental Analysis

Air chambers show good ability in controlling the pressure surge from a water hammer (WH) phenomenon. To simulate an air chamber and study the behavior of air inside it, a compressed air vessel (CAV) is considered in a pressurized system. The current work consists of experimental tests and one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations for an air pocket within a CAV in the case of rapid pressurization and the occurrence of WH in a pressurized system. The pressure variations create vorticity and turbulence with oscillating behaviors, but the available 1D models are unable to simulate those phenomena adequately. Therefore, by using the measured data, proper CFD analysis is conducted considering the effect of the wall, y (+) , mesh size, turbulence, and the wall treatment method to better understand the behavior of the system. Results of the CFD simulation show that realizable k-epsilon turbulence model, when coupled with the enhanced wall treatment (EWT) method, works adequately for modeling the pressure oscillation. The volume of fluid (VOF) model and the piecewise linear interface calculation (PLIC) method have presented good ability in the prediction of the air-water interface.