Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

We aim to develop supersonic and large-scale jet-pumps in collaboration with our industrial Canadian partner, IVAC. This company utilizes jet-pumps for material transport related to a variety of industries, such as oil/gas, mining, and forestry. Currently, IVAC's jet-pumps face two primary issues. First, their suction mass flowrate is not optimized, which increases the pump operation cost. Second, the startup period of their operation is associated with unsteady large amplitude acoustic oscillations, which may potentially lead to fatigue and/or negatively influence the jet-pump performance.*The proposed project aims to address the above issues following both experimental and numerical investigations performed by two Master's students at the University of British Columbia (UBC). First, a one-dimensional gas-dynamics model will be developed. This model will serve as a guideline for the jet-pump design and allows for maximizing the suction flowrate. Then, following the predictions of the model, an experimental setup will be manufactured at UBC. The setup will be equipped with an array of pressure transducers and a Schlieren imaging system. A duplicate pressure measurement system will also be manufactured and integrated with the industrial IVAC system. The pressure data from both the UBC and IVAC setups will be measured, compared, and provided as input for Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations. Using these simulations and Schlieren images, unsteady dynamics of high-speed flows will be studied. Using the generated knowledge, the jet-pump design will be further modified to eliminate the negative impact of unsteady acoustics during the startup period. The newly-designed jet-pump will allow IVAC to increase the speed of material transport, which accelerates production in Canadian oil/gas, mining, and forestry industries that utilize IVAC jet-pumps.