Abstract:
Hot air flow phenomena in an oven with different internal geometry, which was imitated from an industrial lens oven, was studied. Experiments were conducted by classifying into three groups. The first group had a major heat source inside the oven, while the source was removed to outside for the second group. Inside the oven was defined to have separate partition with/without boxes as obstacles. The third group was similar to the second except that minor heat sources were added into the oven for representing the exothermic reaction of polymerization. The experimental results showed that temperature distribution in the oven with external major heat source was more consistent, while partition and obstacle had low effect. In the oven with internal minor heat source, more heat source resulted in poor temperature distribution. Also found that higher flow rate of hot air into the oven helped in consistency temperature distribution. Moreover, PHOENICS 2.1 was used to simulate the hot air flow phenomena in the case of the oven having internal minor heat sources. Temperature distribution obtained from the simulation qualitatively agreed with those experimental results. Besides, the simulation results showed that hot air flowed directly to the bottom of the oven and removed some heat with it causing the lower temperature at the bottom of the oven.