Measurement of air leakage in air-handling units and air conditioning ducts [An article from: Energy & Buildings]

This digital document is a journal article from Energy & Buildings, published by Elsevier in 2005. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
The purpose of this article is to report the experience of design and testing of orifice plate-based flow measuring systems for evaluation of air leakages in components of air conditioning systems. Two of the flow measuring stations were designed with a @b value of 0.405 and 0.418. The third was a dual path unit with orifice plates of @b value 0.613 and 0.525. The flow rates covered with all the four were from 4-94l/s and the range of Reynolds numbers is from 5600 to 76,000. The coefficients of discharge were evaluated and compared with the Stolz equation. Measured C"d values are generally higher than those obtained from the equation, the deviations being larger in the low Reynolds number region. Further, it is observed that a second-degree polynomial is inadequate to relate the pressure drop and flow rate. The lower Reynolds number limits set by standards appear to be somewhat conservative.