SimScale Platform Update 09/2015: Mass Transport Within Flows
Since the last platform update, several enhancements and new features were added to SimScale. Especially the fluid flow simulation capabilities were significantly enhanced. Find a brief description of the new capabilities below or simply log in and test them yourself. Happy simulating!
Mass Transport within Flows
The transport of a certain substances (“species”) within a fluid flow plays an important role in many process engineering or food processing applications.
With the latest update, SimScale now does support the simulation of multiple species instead of just one.
The animation below shows how two different species (coming in from inlet 2 and 3) are mixed within a fluid flow that passes a diffuser. With this simulation type we can assess how well the species are mixed after the diffuser which allows us to optimize both the design as well as the operation mode of the mixing-diffuser.
2 species being mixed within a mixing-diffuser
More Free Surface Flow Options with the August Platform Update
We have seen a lot of interest for SimScale from the naval and marine industry lately such that we enhanced the free surface flow simulation capabilities with two main features:
- Turbulence models: The multiphase flow analysis type now supports both RANS as well as LES models to account for turbulent effects within the free surface flow, enabling you to predict the flow field of a free surface flow more accurately.
- Local time-stepping: In real-world design projects, steady-state simulation results are often preferred in early project phases due to their quicker computing times and significantly smaller result data size. With the new local time-stepping option, SimScale users can now compute steady states of multiphase flows very simple. This is especially valuable for ship hull design, where an example simulation is shown in the images below. The animation shows the simulation approaching the steady-state of a free surface flow around a ship hull. You can find more information regarding the simulation displayed below in this SimScale Forum topic.
Free surface flow around a ship hull design
Advanced Solid Mechanics Analysis Types
More advanced nonlinear solid mechanics analysis types have been tested extensively via a soft launch and were now added to the standard list of available analysis types marked with the keyword “advanced”. They support many different boundary conditions (e.g. remote force, follower pressure, rotating motion), dynamic contact models (penalty method, augmented lagrange) as well as a lot of different material types (elastic, plastic, hyperelastic etc.).
The advanced solid analysis types allow the simulation of many nonlinear mechanical phenomena
New validation projects
In our ongoing effort to provide reliable and robust simulation capability, new validation projects have been added to assess the accuracy of the numerical methods on SimScale. Most notably, a validation study of an industrial butterfly valve flow simulation has been conducted, displayed below.
Flow around the butterfly valve shield
The flow through a butterfly valve was simulated at 9 different opening positions and compared with experimental data. The very satisfying results are summarized within the documentation and one comparison image is shown below.
Comparison between experimental data and SimScale results for the flow coefficient of the valve
Integrated Forum
As already communicated in a separate announcement, an interactive forum has been integrated into the SimScale platform. As a SimScale user, simply log in and hit the “Forum” button in the top right. It takes you directly to the SimScale Forum – an ideal place to discuss the usage of the latest features and the new platform update.
