Internal Pipe Flow with SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation

[Music] in this video we'll be looking at how to set up an internal flow simulation internal analysis and flow simulation is a great way to analyze closed systems or sections of a system such as this piping it just requires us to cap off any openings of the model by creating lids and then flow simulation will extract a watertight fluid body and only perform the simulation within this body speeding up performance substantially the steps we'll take a look at in this video include the lid creation creating a project with the project wizard establishing boundary conditions such as flow rate and pressure openings setting goals to track key parameters in our simulation how to interpret the results and also cloning the project to take a look at some different boundary conditions there's also time stamps in the video description if you'd like to jump ahead to any of these steps what i have on the screen is a system of pipes created with solidworks routing all i've done so far is creating a configuration that has unnecessary details suppressed next i want to make sure that the add-in is loaded which can be done under the command manager tab for solidworks add-ins or the tools add-ins menu to create an internal flow simulation i'll want to cap off any openings in the model and there's a tool just for this to create lids within this flow simulation add-in all i need to do is select the faces on the end and flow simulation will create lids for me so then when i click the check mark create some additional components to cap off that opening i'd recommend fixing or mating these components so they don't move around on you you can also model your own lids if desired now that the openings are capped off we're ready to run the flow simulation wizard we'll name our project i'll call this two outlets choose our unit system choose if you need to include any effects such as heat conduction or gravity in this case i'll include gravity and put that into the y direction because that's how my model is oriented and then click next we need to choose our default fluid which in this case is going to be water click next again until we get all the way through to finish our flow simulation project is created and the next thing i want to do is create some boundary conditions which will represent how the fluid enters or exits the model so for my first boundary condition i want to get the water into here and it's important that i select the inside face of the lid to do this so i'm using the select other tool and i'll set my inlet velocity at 3 meters per second while i'm in this screen i can name this so i'll call this a five inch inlet and i'll also define some goals set a goal for volume flow rate and static pressure at the soap inlet click the check mark and we'll need to specify some conditions for our outlets so i'm going to insert one over here select other and choose that inside face and this will be a pressure opening i'll call this a four inch outlet and set some goals on it also this will automatically track these parameters during the solution i'll click the pin icon so i can create another one with these same settings and this other one is going to be a five inch outlet and i just need to choose its face using the select other command and i'll x out here and we can see i've got these boundary conditions and outlets inlets and outlets defined as well as a whole bunch of goals when i click run and initiate the calculation the flow simulation window pops up and it will allow me to automatically plot these goals i can click the goals plot button and see how these goals stabilize over time so the flow simulation won't stop until all these values have converged it also saves me from trying to extract those numbers later now i can move on to interpreting the results to do this i like to change the transparency so we can see inside these pipes now we can create whatever plot types we want you might have seen flow trajectories which we can insert onto the inlet here i'll do 50 pipes and color code them based on velocity you can see how the vast majority of the flow is going right out the 5 inch outlet these can also be animated we can insert a surface plot and let's take a look at the pressure on all the interior faces of the piping i'll hide those flow trajectories for now and we can see the pressure distribution here we can easily adjust the scale of the legend reset it to its automatic maximum or change the parameter we're looking at of course we can access those goals at any point by listing off a goal plot finally if we want to test a variation we can simply clone this project i'll clone it and call it one outlet and notice we can also clone to different configurations if you need to test the geometry variant but for this new project i'm going to suppress the 5 inch outlet and rerun it you can see now we have a reduced number of goals and once all our goals have converged we'll be able to access these same plots that we defined once again so we can see our new flow trajectories under these new conditions by the way we can clean up the model display a little bit by hiding the computational domain and optionally hiding the global coordinate system if you don't need it hopefully you found this video helpful and let us know in the comments section what type of content you'd like to see [Music] next you

Channel: Hawk Ridge Systems

Views: 82,694

Keywords: solidworks, solidworks 3d cad, 3d cad, 3d modeling, 3d design

Id: 8R60y9Y9480

Length: 8min 6sec (486 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 12 2021