SolidWorks Flow Simulation using a virtual wind tunnel.

well hello and welcome to the cad tutorial channel today we're going to work on a basically a flow analysis or flow simulation in solidworks we're going to be using a vertical wind turbine to accomplish this and we'll be building a wind tunnel uh to do our testing in this wind tunnel that we're going to be making we could use on any uh model out there we just have to place the assembly inside the tunnel and we can be testing our models for how wind will flow over them uh virtually rather than having a real-life physical wind tunnel for those effects this is fairly easy to do we will need uh solidworks flow simulation for us to accomplish it and i'll walk you through that here as quick and painless as i possibly can all right so here's our wind turbine vertical format for it it is a assembly model that i've locked in place so nothing can move at this point so all of its degrees of freedom are locked out because we'll be testing this model statically rather than as it is flowing and functioning as we intend it to so our orientation is important where we want the blades to be we'll just have to do multiple tests and change where the blade positions are with our wind coming over that to see how those changes affect our airflow all right so step one is we're going to start a new part file and this part file is going to be to make the tunnel itself so i'm just going to create a sketch we'll do it on the right plane and draw a rectangle [Music] and we're going to apply some dimensions we'll go 20 inches it's going to be larger than our assembly model that we have so 20 by 20 should do it for me i'm then going to extrude that out and i'm going to make it 36 inches long and i'll do it from the midplane although it really doesn't matter okay this way i'm going to put the model in the middle i have a starting point for the air to flow and then the ending point for the air to come over the model and be collected so the longer the better to give us better results okay so here's our model doesn't matter what material it is just the box we're going to go ahead and shell that out and i'm going to knock a hole on each end of it and i don't really care what the thickness of the shell is just that i have basically a rectangle that passes all the way through we'll go ahead and save that part off and we'll head back over to our assembly model and we'll place that component in okay models in i'm going to make that bottom face to the bottom of my wind turbine and then i can get really precise with this but for today's purposes i'm just going to kind of center it in there okay that looks good all right that's all the modeling we need all the hard work was making the model itself but the testing is fairly easy okay so once we have this we need to save off our assembly and we'll save it as that'll be fine and one last step is i'm going to fix my tunnel so now nothing will move okay now we're ready to go over to the flow simulator and we're going to use the wizard for this we can name our project anything we want we'll just call it wind tunnel we'll use the defaults down and hit the next button i'm going to change my units to ips's i'm going to change my velocity to miles per hour and click next we're going to be doing an internal study and we'll exclude cavities without flow conditions and we'll hit next for our fluids we're going to use a gas and we'll use air and we'll add it we'll leave the rest as the default these we can use as the default as well and we can use this as the default as well okay we'll finish that up and we are ready to proceed all right our first step is to close off our wind tunnel i'm going to come to the tools here and say crate lids and i'm going to create a lid right here on this face and the lid over here on the space okay it's going to ask me do i wish to recompute the computing domain and i'll say yes and yes okay now i need to be able to see my model so i'm going to take this part and i'm going to hide it now i'll be able to see inside i need the lids that's where i'm going to put my boundary conditions on and our tunnel is in place we can see through it so all's good i'm going to come up here to goals to start off with and i'm going to set some global goals and i like to include this is all the data so we're going to include velocity we're going to include turbulence turbulence intensity do that across and then force that way we could pull this over to an fva study if we wanted and since it's a wind turbine i'm going to add torque in here okay we'll click ok what these will help us do is this will help us with the convergence of meshing and the testing to make sure everything is in good shape all right now it's time to add the boundary conditions so i'll click condition boundary condition we're going to pick the inside face of lid one we want to make sure we note the coordinate system my x is going this way and we're going to do it inlet velocity and we're going to set that to 20 miles per hour and i want to make sure my reference axis is that x and it is click ok and then we need one more condition boundary condition we're going to pick the back lid and i'm going to switch to the second type which is pressure opening and i want to do environmental pressure on that clicking ok all right so i should have red arrows on this side blue arrows going both ways on that side everything is done we can go ahead and run our study now this will take a few moments every time we make a change we want to go ahead and make a new calculation for it anytime that we just want to look at the results we can continue the calculations if we're not getting to a convergence factor this will take a few moments we actually have a results box that pops up kind of tells us what's going on it shows us our convergence taking place how many times we're running through the test and you can see that it's achieving convergence somewhere in the 40 to 45 test runs okay and our solver is finished okay so now we can start to look at our results and we're going to run two results on here my first results is going to be the flow so i'm going to right click on that and insert and in this i'm going to pick my wind turbine my vertical wind turbine assembly so that's giving me all the faces that i want to run this across i'm going to set this to 200 this is the number of lines we're going to have coming across it and size 10 we'll try the defaults to begin with click ok we may have to make some adjustments to some of the appearance settings but we'll see how it goes um okay i'm going to change the appearance to static and lines line went to and we're going to change from pressure to velocity although we could leave it on pressure would be fine and click ok let it rerun there we go so now i have a color chart miles per hour and i can kind of start to see how the wind is interacting and changing speed as it interacts with my wind turbine now i can rotate my model and re-run this and see it in different configurations seeing where i'm getting turbulence built up where the air flow is slowing down and circling back i can change the number of lines i could also just take a look rather than picking the whole model i could just pick this blade here or here and put 200 lines on that and get a little better look at that particular piece so this is a work in progress to really study this and take a look at it and we're really only looking at the basics today and get you started and on this road to taking a look at making a better design um so here's our our first step for doing that we're going to do one other test today so i'm going to hide this one it'll come right back if i just unhide it and the second test we're going to do is going to be a surface plot so i'm going to insert a surface plot same model as before i'm going to use vectors for that and i want to be the velocity and we'll use the defaults for the rest of it and we'll click ok so this gives me a velocity on how that's hitting those blades with a little line i don't like the lines i can go ahead and edit that where's that at edit definition and so we did vectors velocity we could do contours this will give us some color across it and hmm there we go now we can kind of see some lines as they go across the surfaces and what's actually happening there again we can increase the number of lines but that will increase the computing time but it starts to give us an idea what's going on here and where we can start to make some improvements i hope you enjoyed this video on a basic wind tunnel again we could put any model in here a car airplane whatever we want to blows some wind across and take a look at the results and hopefully this gets you started and we'll take a more in-depth look at some of these settings and how we can improve our models in a future video but i wanted to get something out quick here that you could start to do some basic testing and play around with as always please subscribe to the channel and if you have an idea for our next video please leave it in the comments below enjoy and good luck

Channel: Morrison Institute of Technology

Views: 19,819

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Id: TTA0Dd5EYAs

Length: 16min 47sec (1007 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 22 2021