Folks, I recently started teaching myself to use the CFD code that is available for work use, which means that while learning them I can use them for simple cases which pertain to our pursuits. In particular, I am looking at the pump outlet into water and into air since it covers single fluid CFD with cavitation and cfd with dissimilar fluids (which I am not certain the code will do). specifically, I am looking for geometry in current pump outlets as I suspect that they limit the max efficient flowrate can dramatically effect the efficiency of the pumps as eventually, the flow will cavitate in the restriction, so if we can make a more efficient outlet, then we can get more efficient pumps for the fixed flowrate groups and more powerful pumps for the fixed orifice groups.
I've unfortunately only got access to Flowworks which while I know it ok, is limited enough and very very quirky... I have been meaning to try some of the open source codecs but lack of time has prevented that. Unfortunately it has been a very very long time since I had a chance to use fidap or fluent or even ansys.... Just to keep the ole brain sharp I may have to break out the finite volume solver I was working on for class years ago and see about figuring out why it never quite worked right.
Hehe Im not much of an ansys fan, I just hope they don't hose Fluent since they bought them a year ago or so(but they probably will, then again there are plenty of improvements they could make to fluent which would be nice, we shall see). Mostly im a Fluent guy, but im getting more into Star-CD/Star-CCM+, its got some nice polyhedral meshing abilities and hooks up with abaqus better for FSI, and thats where the modeling and sim world is headed. It also has a better interface so thats always a plus. Ive done a little in flowworks for a masters class but I wasn't really impressed with it. CFD, its kinda like Black Magic, it works just only people that have been doing it for a long time understand it and can control it. Its also kinda like crack, massive highs and disturbing lows, that and it costs a lot.
Any chance I could convince one of you to run some gas-flow analysis on some cannons? I'd love to test some of my designs without having to cut up bunches of expensive material.
Actualy if you look closly at the Navier-Stokes equations you will start to notice some things about pump outlets. If you try it, it works, but to make it comply with the rules is a bit of a problem. Not impossible, just a problem. Plus it looks nasty. I won't say what it is. Good luck finding it. And CFD won't help.
