Analysis of the Forces Driving the Oscillations in 3D Fluidic Oscillators

One of the main advantages of fluidic oscillators is that they do not have moving parts, which brings high reliability whenever being used in real applications. To use these devices in real applications, it is necessary to evaluate their performance, since each application requires a particular injected fluid momentum and frequency. In this paper, the performance of a given fluidic oscillator is evaluated at different Reynolds numbers via a 3D-computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis. The net momentum applied to the incoming jet is compared with the dynamic maximum stagnation pressure in the mixing chamber, to the dynamic output mass flow, to the dynamic feedback channels mass flow, to the pressure acting to both feedback channels outlets, and to the mixing chamber inlet jet oscillation angle. A perfect correlation between these parameters is obtained, therefore indicating the oscillation is triggered by the pressure momentum term applied to the jet at the feedback channels outlets. The paper proves that the stagnation pressure fluctuations appearing at the mixing chamber inclined walls are responsible for the pressure momentum term acting at the feedback channels outlets. Until now it was thought that the oscillations were driven by the mass flow flowing along the feedback channels, however in this paper it is proved that the oscillations are pressure driven. The peak to peak stagnation pressure fluctuations increase with increasing Reynolds number, and so does the pressure momentum term acting onto the mixing chamber inlet incoming jet.