Optimizing Dry Ice Blasting Nozzle Divergent Length using CFD for Noise Reduction

Article history: Received 21 March 2019 Received in revised form 14 May 2019 Accepted 9 June 2019 Available online 3 July 2019 The primary disadvantage of dry ice blasting (dib) is high noise emission. The process may reach an alarming sound level of up to 130 dBA (safe noise exposure 85 dBA for eight working hours) at high blasting pressure. Present safety measures rely entirely on administrative control by encapsulating the entire system with sound insulation or using personal protective equipment. This limitation has made this research a significant work by controlling the noise with the engineering approach. Therefore, the research objective is to optimize dib nozzle geometry in term of divergent length on the effect of the noise level and to study the noise development characteristic inside nozzle geometry using CFD analysis. The research study employed a Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) method to evaluate the effect of different divergent length on the acoustic power level. The simulation was carried out using density based, standard kepsilon turbulence model and also broadband shock noise model were activated in ANSYS Fluent to monitor Acoustic Power Level of the simulated nozzle. The result shows that the lowest value of the acoustic power level that is responsible for producing the lowest noise emission is 230 mm.