| Abstrakt: |
The term appliances describes a wide range of products that are used to perform a wide variety of tasks. In the home environment, household appliances like refrigerators, ovens, washing machines, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, hair driers are sold in million pieces per year; they also have commercial and industrial application. Typical products of the appliance industry have a relatively low industrial cost and the appliance market shows a strong competition, in which appliance technical performance plays a role together with aesthetics and costs. Therefore, efforts in applied research for product technical improvement can be done only if the ratio cost to benefits is advantageous. Many such appliances have complex fluid-dynamic problems; it is important that any experimental technique bears inherent characteristics of simplicity, provides a rapid means to collect experimental data, provides information that engineers can readily exploit for product enhancement, and mostly for computational fluid-dynamic (CFD) code validation. Particle image velocimetry (PIV) satisfies most of the above-mentioned requirements and therefore appears as a good candidate experimental technique to be proposed in the field of appliances. Nevertheless, PIV applications are rare. The PIVNet2 workshop on "PIV application to appliances" that took place in Ancona on June 2003 intended to illustrate the great potential for application of the PIV technique in this sector. This chapter presents an overview of PIV application to appliances according to the outcome from this workshop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
