Mixing Tank with SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation

foreign [Music] we'll go over how to set up a mixing problem like this one where we have two fluids inside a tank and an agitator that rotates to mix them together you can follow along with this tutorial by downloading the step file Linked In the video description below we'll start off by opening the step file and if you look through our feature tree you'll see there's multiple different bodies going to set the tank to be transparent you'll see we also have a body that represents the volume of water I'm also going to set that to be transparent and finally we have a body sized as a rotating region this is placed around our agitator the set that to also being transparent I'll change my seam color to plain white now to get started creating our flow simulation project we'll go to our wizard oh we need to save our file then we'll go to our wizard give the study a name and we'll choose U.S units but I'm going to change down here under loads and motion to change the angular velocity to RPM for physical effects we're going to want to enable gravity and set that in our global minus y direction we'll enable rotation to support our rotating agitator agitator and we'll set our type to Sliding which is the most accurate general purpose rotation method we have in flow simulation but when we do this it warns us that it'll make the analysis time dependent so it also enabled this checkbox for us which we can go up and set our total analysis time to the period we want which is five seconds this is going to be an internal analysis we want to uncheck exclude cavities without conditions because they're rotating agitators what's going to cause all the flow here we'll click next and we want to choose our liquid now we're going to choose water and for our second liquid you could choose one of these other ones here but if you just want to see the mixing Behavior like as if we had some food dye or food coloring inside the tank then what we could do is go to our engineering database by clicking the new button and what I've done here is I just went and took my predefined water and copied it and then pasted it into my user defined liquids library and renamed it to died so or it could be water to just any other definition of the liquid so with this I can load in both of them I can go down here to my user defined load in that dyed water and they'll both be here as my default fluids then when I get to the last screen I need to pay attention to concentrations and I want the tank to be initialized to just 100 percent of the regular water it's important to consider when we're setting this up we're making an assumption that the tank is completely full and there's no airspace at the top so when we click finish it'll create my flow simulation project the computational domain will be sized incorrectly at first this is because of these other bodies that we have here so what we'll probably want to do is go into our input data folder right click and enable component control where we will disable these other components such as the water volume and the rotating region then if I go into my computational domain edit it and click reset we'll see that it snaps to the size of the tank as expected we'll specify the rotating region and choose the rotating region component from our tree and set our angular velocity of 120 RPM also we want to initialize based on this water body here this to be a different fluid so the way we do that is with an initial condition from our conditions pull down menu we'll choose the water volume you could also disable solid component here if you hadn't already and we'll set this to be 100 of our diet water really we're just using this as a separate fluid definition so we can track the mixing leave all the other initial settings to be the same now it'd be useful to have some goals to track our parameters of Interest so I'm going to insert a surface goal select the agitator body and track the torque in the y direction on the agitator let's hide our computational domain to clean up our display and let's edit our mesh settings by editing the global mesh and I'm going to turn my mesh level up to level five finally I want to adjust something about the result saving so I'm going to right click on the input data folder go to calculation control options and adjust the saving tab where I'll enable the transient Explorer I'll click the three dots here to control what's saved by the transient Explorer and I'm going to uncheck the velocity components and enable the volume fraction of our diet water finally we can click run to run the analysis so as this is a transient analysis it's going to take some time to solve I believe it takes about 10 minutes to solve on this computer so we'll fast forward through to when the results are available and continue with interpreting them now that the solve is complete we can go to our results processing if I open my results folder you can see right now in a transient study we're at time equals five seconds so when I insert cut plots and things like this I'll be expecting to see the values for five seconds of time so let's insert cut plots and we'll plot Contours of the mass fraction of water died so we can see a pretty even mix here by the end of our solution if we were to right click and load a Time moment and go to the beginning of the solution at zero seconds we'd see this division where we had initialized the fluid to the lower section let's also insert a surface plot onto our agitator and we'll plot pressure on the agitator this is just a way for us to visualize the agitator while it will be rotating and finally this load time moment functionality exists only for specific moments of time that we saved we could specify a saving period for it if we wanted to but we can also use that transient explorer that we enabled if I activate that and uh let's check my cut plot I might have saved the wrong parameter so the um we only have access to a subset of parameters within the transient Explorer so you can see it was actually volume fraction of water that I wanted to be using because that's what I had enabled in it so once I enable that the transient Explorer gives us this playback bar where we can quickly play back through the analysis now in order for this display to look better we'll want to hide the original body of the agitator and now when we play we see the motion occurring from that surface plot you can also increase the number of levels of our Contours and I'd recommend for a cleaner display to fix the minimum and maximum values here for the volume fraction so I'll adjust this range to go from zero to one you could do the same thing for the pressure using an intelligent range then we'll see a more uniform display so it appears we're getting a pretty complete mix after just about two and a half seconds we could always probe the locations to see the extremes that are occurring at the top and bottom of the tank here now to get out our torque we'll insert a gold plot I'll choose to plot this against physical time so when I go to my goal history since this is a transient study we need to kind of pick out the steady state value which seems to be around here so around 100 pound-feet of torque hopefully you found this setup process helpful it's a bit of a more advanced analysis incorporating a transient study and rotation if you want to learn more about using SolidWorks flow simulation for industrial equipment applications you can check out the webinar Linked In the description below and let us know in the comments what type of content you'd like to see next foreign

Channel: Hawk Ridge Systems

Views: 22,663

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

Id: cyc92a0bPeI

Length: 10min 32sec (632 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 04 2023