Automotive and Transportation

Flow streamlines

Catalytic converters are used to reduce the toxicity of emissions from internal combustion engines. A typical design consists of a reaction chamber where exhaust gases are mixed with excess air to oxidize carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon pollutants into carbon dioxide and water.

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Pressure and flow distribution

With FloEFD, engineers can investigate the flow of the various gases inside a catalytic converter quite easily. For this specific task, the engineer is interested in improving the performance of the part by minimizing the flow resistance. Therefore, FloEFD was used to calculate the flow distribution and pressure drop of the exhaust gases through the two sections of the catalytic converter . By taking advantage of the FloEFD porous media model, the engineer was able to reduce the calculation time significantly.

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Isolines of pressure are displayed on a cut plane through the model. As the flow enters through the inlet at the bottom left it is immediately turned through a relatively sharp angle. This results in a rapidly varying pressure distribution between the inlet and the first catalyst stage. It can be seen that pressure varies across the inlet, suggesting that the flow here is non-uniform.

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A cut plane displaying contours and isolines of pressure is augmented by vector plots through the two porous catalyst stages. Since the catalyst material is porous in one direction only the flow is immediately straightened, as can be seen from the vectors. A region of high pressure is seen opposite the inlet, extending into the first catalyst stage. By contrast the pressure distribution across the second catalyst stage and the outlet is more uniform.

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Velocity trajectories

Velocity trajectories (coloured by speed) provide a useful insight as to how the flow progresses through the model. As a result of the angled inlet, it can be seen that the flow passes more readily through the top half of the first catalyst stage. This indicates that the mass flow through the catalytic converter is overly biased towards this region. Using FloEFD, the engineer can readily perform a number of “what-if” analyses to investigate the relative performance of alternative designs. View Larger Detail

Temperature plot inside cabin

Climate control is extremely important to allow for safe and healthy conditions no matter where you are … in a car, inside a building or on an airplane. In this case, the engineer was interested in optimizing airflow inside the cabin of a heavy goods vehicle.

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Flow distribution inside cabin

FloEFD features many time-savings capabilities. By using existing 3D CAD geometry and solid model information such as features and parameters, FloEFD can help you simulate your designs in real-word conditions. It also provides you with functionality that is not easily offered by other CFD programs. For example, traditional CFD programs require users to create additional solid parts to represent the fluid (empty) regions – an extremely time-consuming process since each region must be identified manually and then geometry needs to be created to fill it. But FloEFD automatically differentiates between the two for internal and external flows and automatically represents the fluid domain. As a result, FloEFD frees the user from creating unnecessary geometry just to prepare a solid model for analysis.

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Velocity plot

Climate control is extremely important to allow for safe and healthy conditions no matter where you are … in a car, inside a building or on an airplane.

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Velocity plot

In this case, the engineer was designing an air-conditioning system for large vehicles and wanted to obtain a uniform airflow at the outlets. FloEFD was used to calculate mass flow at given rotating speeds.

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Velocity plot

Since the process of optimizing a design is iterative in nature, the engineer was able to conduct “what-if” analysis with relative ease. The process was simple: FloEFD allowed the engineer to create multiple variations of his design by simply modifying his solid model and without having to reapply loads, boundary conditions, material properties etc to analyze it. He was then able to compare the results among the many design options to choose the best possible design.

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Surface Contours

FloEFD’s comprehensive range of post-processing tools may be used to perform both qualitative and quantitative analyses. Here, contours of pressure displayed on the impeller blades show that the pressure distribution varies depending on their location relative to the outlet shown at the bottom right of the image.

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