Cornell Pump Co. experienced a 100x speed-up of a full transient system-level simulation and performance curve generation using the new CFdesign Motion and high performance computing (HPC) Modules from Blue Ridge Numerics. Cornell engineers performed transient simulations to evaluate a centrifugal pump design in only 2 hr, down from 200 hr, significantly slashing product development time.
Cornell has been building centrifugal pumps since 1946. Their pumps are used in water intake, water processing, pressure boosting, refineries, energy recovery, cooling towers, distillation systems, wastewater processing, mining and power plants. The significant performance increases the Cornell team experienced using CFdesign will have major implications for the development of new pumps. Beyond cutting computer simulation time from weeks to hours, it is expected to reduce the number of pump castings that have to be made for physical testing. Eliminating just one of the physical tests could save the Cornell team as much as three months of development time.
With CFdesign and the UVCalc Module you can visualize both the velocity and computed fluence rate in a UV reactor. Many other types of “what if” scenarios can be conducted and visualized, such as how the transmittance of the liquid in the reactor can affect the amount of UV dose delivered.
“With much faster running speeds, we will be able to do many more simulation runs in less time,” said Andrew Enterline, design engineer at Cornell. “We’ll spend more time designing the product and less time and money in pattern rework, re-pouring castings, and physical development testing, helping us create optimal product designs from the start.”
In the past, generating a typical pump curve for the Cornell design team required 300 iterations at 1.5 iterations per hour to evaluate a single design, so the team explored options to speed up the development cycle. New rotational algorithms for transient rotating modeling included in the latest release of the Motion Module help speed up simulation time by 20x on a standard desktop computer, allowing Cornell and other design teams to quickly and accurately evaluate performance curves. In addition, the Motion Module can be combined with the new CFdesign HPC Module to provide an overall 100x speed up. Cornell leveraged the power of the Motion and HPC Modules to speed up their design process by partnering with R Systems, a provider of high-end computing resources for research, to conduct their simulations on an 8 node HPC cluster setup, allowing them to complete those 300 iterations now in only two hours.
The Motion Module: Many mechanical engineering applications require understanding of how liquid and gas flows interact with solid objects. The CFdesign Motion Module allows users to create a virtual prototyping environment to better understand these behaviors by simulating the way components interact and respond to prescribed flows. All the physical effects of the motion as well as the time-history are output for data review and to create animations for visual studies. In addition to the simulation of rotating turbomachinery described, CFdesign also helps engineers model:
• Flow-driven motion
• Orbital motion
• Nutating disk motion
• Combined linear and angular motion
• Sliding-vane pump motion
• Automatic and adaptive time-step determination
• External driving and spring resistance models
The CFdesign HPC Module: This module allows CFdesign users to harness the power and investment of Windows HPC Server 2008, enabling more design studies in less time and reducing the time it takes to achieve answers for large complex models. The Module can be used with a small cluster, a data center, or service providers, such as R Systems to gain access to HPC resources. Dramatic improvements in speed are possible by using a cluster of four or eight computers for simulation. CFdesign v10, the Motion Module, and the HPC Module are available immediately as an integrated, associative system for Autodesk Inventor, CATIA, CoCreate, NX, Pro/ENGINEER, SolidWorks, Solid Edge, and SpaceClaim.
Internal flow patterns of Cornell’s centrifugal pump, modeled with CFdesign, highlight the pressure of the liquid and the pattern of the flow.
UVCalc Module: In a separate development, Blue Ridge has introduced the new CFdesign UVCalc Module, an industry-first Upfront CFD program for simulating and validating ultraviolet (UV) reactor performance to ensure accurate fluence rates (irradiances) for UV light disinfection. The use of germicidal UV light is a rapidly expanding technology that helps ensure public safety by deactivating the DNA of bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens, removing their ability to multiply and cause disease. With the new partnership of Blue Ridge Numerics and Bolton Photosciences, Inc., design engineers developing UV applications for drinking water disinfection, wastewater treatment, and manufacturing processes for the food and beverage, medical device, pharmaceutical, and semiconductors industries (among others), can now easily leverage fluid flow and UV calculation capabilities to speed up and optimize their product development process. Emphasized is the ability to validate UV reactor performance for biodosimetry testing. Exploring multiple design scenarios before building prototypes for physical testing saves significant cost and time.
UVCalc, developed by Dr. Bolton, is a software program that maps out the fluence rate or irradiance distribution in a UV reactor. The combination of CFdesign and UVCalc together in the CFdesign UVCalc Module allows engineers to simulate the UV fluence rate in combination with the flow field, to ultimately predict the UV dose delivered. Predicting the UV dose is vital, but even more important is studying and understanding the sensitivity of a reactor design with respect to changing conditions, such as piping connections, water transmittance, and flow rate.
“Validating a UV reactor’s performance for biodosimetry testing through digital ‘what if’ scenarios helps significantly reduce the number of physical prototypes that a company needs to build and ensures a more accurate design upfront in the process,” said Dr. Jim Bolton, President, Bolton Photosciences. “CFdesign provides an easy to use software platform that addresses geometry and flow calculations at the design engineering level. The combination of UVCalc and CFdesign creates a synergistic design tool that provides the data and visualization needed to quickly determine the optimum UV reactor performance.”
The combination of CFdesign and the UVCalc Module now allows you to:
• Determine the distribution of UV dose along various flow paths in the reactors and determine the impact of other factors, such as the flow rate, flow distribution, and axial mixing, all which can affect the fluence or UV dose and the performance of the reactor.
• Run scenarios that include simulating the effect of inlet flow distribution changes (piping), different transmittance of the fluids, changes in flow rate or flow obstructions.
• See side-by-side design comparison and data results of multiple reactor concepts through contour plots, cut planes, iso-surface, particle traces and vectors.
• Explore a broad spectrum of possibilities to achieve an optimal design before proceeding with the very expensive and time consuming certification process.
You can view a video of CFdesign V10 for Inventor 2010 Video at http://www.screencast.com/t/8wlFvJ29f
Blue Ridge Numerics, Inc.
www.cfdesign.com
::Design World::
Source: :: Design World ::
