When the airflow patterns inside a lawn mower deck are
understood, the deck can be redesigned to be efficient and have an
increased cutting ability. To learn more, a combination of
computational and experimental studies was performed to
investigate the effects of blade and housing designs on a flow
pattern inside a 1.1m wide corotating double-spindle lawn
mower deck with side discharge. For the experimental portion of
the study, air velocities inside the deck were measured using a
laser Doppler velocimetry (LDV) system. A high-speed video camera
was used to observe the flow pattern. Furthermore, noise levels
were measured using a sound level meter. For the computational
fluid dynamics (CFD) work, several arbitrary radial sections of a
two-dimensional blade were selected to study flow computations. A
three-dimensional, full deck model was also developed for
realistic flow analysis. The computational results were then
compared with the experimental results.
