A 2D numerical benchmark of an air Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube based on a fractional factorial design

This work presents a numerical benchmark for the modeling of air Ranque-Hilsch vortex tubes assessing the solver type (pressure- vs. density-based), two different turbulence models (Standard k − ε and k − ω SST), the near-wall region treatment (high-Reynolds vs. low-Reynolds number), different boundary conditions and the inclusion or not of source terms that model the pressure convection term ignored in most turbulent flow simulations. The significance of each parameter is obtained from an analysis of variance of a fractional factorial design.