Particles, whether liquid droplets, bubbles, or solids, interact with fluid flows in complex ways. These interactions influence product performance, efficiency, and safety.
Understanding behavior within fluid flow with particle simulations is critical for industries ranging from automotive and aerospace to pharmaceuticals and consumer goods.
What is Fluid Dynamics Engineer?
The Fluid Dynamics Engineer (FMK) role on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform includes capabilities for particle injection and analysis in fluid dynamics simulations. This capability enables engineers to simulate Lagrangian particle-tracking to analyze the behavior of particle-laden fluid flows.
What is Needed for a Particle Study?
For any particle study in a fluid-flow simulation software, the particle injection source and particle model must be defined. Thermal effects can be enabled to account for the heating or cooling of Lagrangian particles on fluid flow.
- Particle Injection Source: The Fluid Scenario Creation app in the Fluid Dynamics Engineer role includes an option to specify a particle injection source, which defines a location, such as a surface, where Lagrangian particles enter the fluid region.
- Particle Modeling: Lagrangian particles can be defined as either massless or with mass. Massless particles move along streamlines; when mass is assigned, the particle trajectory is subject to drag, gravity, pressure, and virtual mass forces. For simulations with very large particles, the effects of particle motion can also affect the flow field momentum and energy.
An Example of Where Particle Studies are Used
In the example below, a transient flow analysis was conducted for a cyclone separator used to separate particulate matter from polluted air. These separators are popular in a variety of industrial applications because they have few moving parts and no mechanical filters.
Problem statement for a cyclone separator
For a cyclone separator study:
- Air flows into the cyclone separator at a tangential velocity of about 10 m/s and establishes a high-speed, rotating flow vortex within the separator’s body. The vortex transports lightweight particles toward the outlet.
- The heavier particles collide against the walls of the separator’s body, gradually lose their momentum, and fall into the dust collector.
- For simulation purposes, it is assumed that the cyclone separator vents to ambient pressure.
- To analyze the separator’s performance, the following KPIs are evaluated: pressure drop across the separator inlet and outlet, separator efficiency, and visualization of the vortex core and velocity profile.
Other Considerations for Particle Simulations on 3DEXPERIENCE
To analyze a cyclone separator in Fluid Dynamics Engineer, a transient study employing a mesh-based approach is used to capture the flow volume accurately. Air will be used as the fluid suspending the particles, similar to real-world scenarios.
Study Time
Additionally, to ensure accurate values for separation efficiency, the total time of a transient particle flow simulation should be greater than the average residence time of the particles. Residence time is a measure of how much time a particle remains inside the cyclone separator before exiting through the outlet or being trapped in the dust collector.
Mesh-Based Approach
The mesh-based method for defining flow volume requires users to select a flow region for the components under analysis and to identify flow openings.
Particle Definition
To define the behavior of the air and particles flowing through the separator, the Physics Behavior option is selected. This lets users enable particle modeling to define particle properties, particle profiles (whether the particle is massless or has mass), and particle interactions.
Defining particle simulation study settings
The physics behavior of a fluid flow includes the effects of various environmental conditions on the fluid as well as the innate physics behaviors of the fluid itself.
Boundary Conditions
Boundary conditions include the velocity of the air and the particles at the inlet of the cyclone separator.
The particles gradually lose their momentum because they collide against the walls of the cyclone separator and amongst themselves. Some particles fall into the dust collector at the bottom.
Particle Injection
A Particle Injection Source needs to be defined to control the mass flow rate of the suspended particles.
Accessing the Particle Injection Source command
These sources can specify various characteristics of the particle flow, including:
- An injection profile describes particle flow in terms of the overall mass of particles or the specific number of particles over a time period.
- Size profile to define either uniform size or vary randomly within a size range, it can follow a linear or logarithmic distribution, including a Rosin-Rammler distribution.
- The velocity of the particles can be absolute velocity or relative to the fluid flow at the injection location.
- Temperature of the particles for heat transfer simulations.
- Parcel size, where a parcel is a collection of particles that share the same physical qualities. For relatively large parcel sizes, the simulation groups more particles together to improve performance.
Setting up a particle study source
Accurately Modeling Particle Studies
The particle simulation capability in 3DEXPERIENCE can empower fluid engineers who need to perform routine fluid flow and thermal calculations. By combining advanced simulation techniques with a collaborative platform, it can accelerate product innovation and ensure high-quality designs.
To learn more about using particle simulations for your team, contact us here.
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.
