The effect of the change of waist drum length on the energy separation effect of Maxwell structured tubes

In this study, the effects of the variation of the length of the waist drum on the energy separation and flow characteristics of the Maxwell structured tube (a special type of vortex tube) are systematically investigated through the combination of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations, thermodynamic analyses, and experimental tests to enhance the efficiency of its application in the industrial field.The results show that Maxwell tube has the best energy separation performance at an inlet pressure of 0.4MPa when the length of the girdle section is 60% of the length of the hot end tube. For all five structural configurations with different drum waist lengths, the energy separation tends to decrease as the cold mass fraction decreases. In addition, the experimental results further confirm that the CFD simulation has a certain deviation in evaluating the energy separation capability of the hot end of the Maxwell structure tube compared with the actual test. The numerical prediction results are slightly lower than the measured values, suggesting that there is still room for optimization of the simulation methodology in this aspect.