SimScale Platform Update 09/2015: Mass Transport Within Flows

Since the last platform update, several enhancements and new features were added to SimScale. The fluid flow simulation capabilities, in particular, 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 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 supports 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 and the operation mode of the mixing diffuser.

More Free Surface Flow Options with August’s Platform Update

We have seen a lot of interest for SimScale from the marine industry lately, so much that we enhanced the free surface flow simulation capabilities with two main features:

• Turbulence models: The multiphase flow analysis type now supports both RANS and LES models to account for turbulent effects within the free surface flow, enabling you to more accurately predict the flow field of a free surface flow.
• Local time-stepping: In real-world design projects, steady-state simulation results are often preferred in early project phases due to their faster computing times and significantly smaller result data size. With the new local time-stepping option, SimScale users can now easily and simply compute steady states of multiphase flows. This is particularly 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 forum topic.

Advanced Solid Mechanics Analysis Types

Extensive testing has been carried out for more advanced nonlinear solid mechanics analysis types via a soft launch. These were then added to the standard list of available analysis types and marked with the keyword “advanced”. They support many different boundary conditions (e.g., remote force, follower pressure, rotating motion), dynamic contact models (penalty and augmented Lagrangian methods), as well as a variety of different material types (elastic, plastic, hyperelastic, etc.).

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, as displayed below.

The flow through a butterfly valve was simulated at nine different opening positions and compared with experimental data. The very satisfying results are summarized within the documentation, and one comparison image is shown below.

Integrated Forum

As already detailed in a separate announcement, an interactive forum has been integrated into the SimScale platform. As a SimScale user, you can simply log in and hit the “Forum” button in the top right. It takes you directly to the SimScale Forum, which is an ideal place to discuss the use of the latest features and the new platform update.

To discover all the simulation features provided by SimScale, download the document below.