Development of High Efficiency and Low Noise Cross-Flow Fans for Room Air Conditioner Indoor Unit

Cross flow fans are used for fan systems in a household room air conditioner indoor unit. In recently, in the view of environmental problem and cost saving, energy saving performance is important specification for users. Reducing fan motor electric power consumption is effective for this purpose. And also low noise fans are needed for comfortable circumferences. To meet these user needs, we developed a high efficiency and silent cross flow fan using CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and experiments. In CFD, numerical model is calculated by commercial software using steady state, Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) and k-ε turbulent flow model. The developed cross flow fan is geometrically characterized by the solidity (the ratio of the blade pitch and blade cord length) distribution, and the blade edge shape. The solidity average of developed fan was larger than the conventional fan and the solidity distribution was smooth. And the developed fan has the sinusoidal shape of the outer diameter edge. This sinusoidal shape edge makes pressure distribution on the tongue to be more dispersed compare to that of conventional straight edge so that tonal noise was restrained.