Simulating pumps is hard!
Pumps, by their very nature, include moving and rotating parts so it is essential to allow this motion during the simulation. Positive displacement pumps move the fluids by mechanical action so, the need to accurately model the motion of the components increases even more. To add to that, every detail counts. Capturing tiny details such as leakages of just a few microns along with motion of the rotor makes the problem even more challenging. As a result, preparing pump simulations have required immense amount of manual work to be done at the geometry decomposition and meshing level. Because of the specialized details, the learning curve was pretty steep. Then taking the meshed model to a CFD solver and setting up motion of the different meshed parts also required great understanding and skills. All these steps required specialized processes which were prone to manual errors resulting in loss of time. Unfortunately, this cumbersome set up process has been a barrier to the mass adoption of simulation for positive displacement pumps.
So, we took up the challenge to make this better and expand pump simulation. To go faster, the process for setting up these CFD simulations must be automatic or a semi-automatic. At the same time, you must have the freedom and flexibility to do a deep dive and debug every important step — from geometry decomposition, to meshing to CFD setup. There are other tools that attempt to do this but unfortunately they take away the flexibility to make modifications if the process doesn’t work for a particular pump model. The answer is a customized template that guides the simulation setup while allowing full flexibility. We have just released such a template for positive displacement pumps called PumpModeler.
PumpModeler provides the right balance of automation and flexibility to make a huge difference, especially for engineers who are new or infrequently do pump simulations. Here are some advantages that our team has seen:
- Speeds up the model preparation process — the time for a typical model could be reduced from 4-8 hours to less than 1 hour
- Ensures accurate results — automatically incorporates best practices into the model so that it is more likely to match physical testing
- For every engineer — the template drastically reduces the skill and experience level so that every engineer can successfully model positive displacement pumps. This is especially attractive for companies who do not have experienced CFD analyst groups.
Click to enlarge
PumpModeler is an ACT based customization of ANSYS Workbench for automatic CFD simulation of positive displacement pumps. While it is currently available for gerotor pumps, we are working to extend it to other commonly used positive displacement pumps. To learn more about PumpModeler and many other exciting ACT extensions, check out the ANSYS ACT Application Store on the Customer Portal.
The post Pump Simulation Problems Solved appeared first on ANSYS Blog.