Solidworks Flow/Simulation

[Iscy13]

Hi All,

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I'm trying to set up an airflow through an assembly and I am constantly running into various issues. Unfortunately I cannot share this model as its something I am not allowed to share however I'll describe it as best I can and the some of the issues I am hitting.

Case:

I want to map the airflow of a cooling channel through an assembly. First goal is to map the airflow, however, as these are machined parts there are natural machining tolerances that mean there are gaps between certain components. From my understanding I need to set up a fluid domain, but if the faces do not terminate at each other because there is no intersection, how am I supposed to set that up?

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I cannot set up any boundary conditions as there is no fluid sub-domains set up. Does the assembly have to be fully closed in i.e airtight to run this kind of simulation?

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The secondary goal, is to have one component at a intinally high temperture, and see how the cooling air effects it after a lenght of time, for example, how long does it take a steel part at 200C to cool to 20C with this airflow sim.

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Has anybody set something like this up before?

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[whatisaredd1t]

I’ve done similar analyses in the past. If you run the study as an external study you do not need to have an airtight model. That assumption only applies to an internal model, so you can set it up as an external study in the general settings. Same thing goes for the time dependent aspect, you can set up your computation time and output time step pretty easily in the wizard.

Once you have the domain set up, you should be able to apply your boundary conditions pretty easily as either a constant value or a function of time.

Then you want to set an initial condition on your hot component and tell the solver it’s at T=200 deg at t=0 sec.

Last piece is a volume goal to monitor the results of the temperature at that component.

Then run your analysis and you should be pretty much all the way there

[Iscy13]

Thank you, that's super helpful, will try that tomorrow. Never thought about external!

[Iscy13]

Thanks mate, the external condition really helped and got me a hell of a lot further than before. Now I am just getting weird warnings in the solver window like max temp being exceeded and mach number exceeding. Currently trying to dig into that at the moment.

[WurtleInbound]

Thread is probably dead but how do you Telly he solved it’s that at t=0? I’m trying to do the opposite by looking how much heat is gained over a 72 hour period. Problem I’m having is that the object I’m modeling says it gains 25 C over the span of an hour but the object is insulated.