PreonLab at CFD Schuck

The assessment of oil spray cooling systems for electric machines is improved by taking heat transfer phenomena into account during the CFD simulation:

CFD-Schuck Infobrief 2018/1 (german)

Gearbox simulation is a challenging topic in CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics). Read what CFD Schuck thinks of PreonLab:

CFD-Schuck Infobrief 2016/4 (german)

Validation of a Sprinkling Simulation with PreonLab

The Chair of Automobile Engineering at the TU Dresden is investigating and developing a tool chain for virtual water management for the automotive industry. Multiple simulation tools were evaluated for the task of predicting water paths on a car door. PreonLab compared favorably against other evaluated tools in terms of validated results, performance and usability:

TU Dresden -Sprinkling

The study was conducted by Daniel Wickert as part of his diploma thesis and was supported by Daimler AG.

PreonLab at qpunkt

Read about how qpunkt successfully introduced water management simulations to their portfolio using PreonLab, delivering reliable simulations for the automotive industry:

qpunkt reference story (german)

Gearbox Simulation Setup Demo

Do you remember our gearbox simulation video? (https://youtu.be/CEerYI-BAgE)

Watch the easy and efficient workflow from setup to simulation and final rendering. All performed within PreonLab.

Static Mixer for Highly Viscous Fluids

Workflow – Material Visualization Actions

Ever wondered how easy it is to get amazing visualizations with PreonLab?

In this video you can see an example of a car model that is edited in its different materials and finally flooded with water.
All of this with only a few mouse clicks!

Rigid Body Simulation Showcase

Our particle-based rigid body solver can handle concave and very detailed geometries, is multithreaded and optimized for integration with the PREON fluid solver.

In this case, only the blue gear is keyframed while the others are simulated. This further simplifies the model setup for gearbox simulations. 

Water Wading

With PreonLab, setting up a wading simulation like this one is no difficult task. In addition, obtaining usable results is incredibly fast: On an Intel Xeon CPU E5-2650 v4 (12 physical cores @ 2.2GHz), simulating the scene shown in the video took 8.5 hours.

Another 6.5 hours were needed to render the simulation results with PreonLab. 

Gear Box

Defining rigid object kinematics in PreonLab is as easy as possible. By defining revolutions per second and applying transformation hierarchies, even complex gear box setups can be accomplished within minutes.

The showcased simulation has been performed with 2000 rpm of each gear and in different viscosity variants. The liquid phase consists of 23 million samples with a resolution of 0.75 mm. The extent of the gear box is 0.5 meters and has been modeled using Blender.

Water Droplet Simulation

Merging water droplets with surface tension simulated and rendered in PreonLab. Technical preview of the CSF model that will be part of PreonLab in the next major release.

Drag Force Model

Being able to efficiently simulate free-surface flow without necessarily simulating the air phase of the simulation domain is a powerful method for rapid-prototyping. Within only a couple of hours the engineer gets the results of the PreonLab simulation and can react on the simulation analysis by performing another simulation with an evolved CAD model. Using the Liu drag force model, the air phase can nevertheless be taken into account without reducing the performance of the simulation.

In the showcased video you can see the validation results that have been compared to real world data in a tire development test environment.

Using PreonLab – Kinematics

We are working hard on making the usability and user experience of PreonLab unmatched in the world of CAE. Our node-based connection system makes it possible to define complex kinematics as a hierarchy of transformations. PreonLab includes easy-to-use tools for defining the connections and keyframing the properties of each and every participant of the simulation.

This also comes in handy for creating self-explanatory simulation videos using tracking shots, clipping objects, sensors or one of the other powerful tools included in the PreonLab post-processing.

Airflow Coupling

This sprinkling simulation is an example of some of the major advantages of PreonLab. The setup and preprocessing for a complicated simulation like this only takes 30 minutes for a PreonLab user. The wiper movement is imported from MSC Adams data and the fluid is coupled to an imported airflow field that has been simulated with Star CCM+.

The simulation of 20 physical seconds is performed within 12 hours on a standard Intel computer. The video shows a comparison of the same setup with and without the precomputed airflow field.

PreonLab Promotion Video

This video was created for the Automotive Testing Expo 2016 and showcases multiple applications from water wading to tank sloshing.

Sprinkling Simulation

Fully dynamic sprinkling simulation considering imported air flow velocities caused by the airstream of the moving vehicle. Additionally, the wiper activity is considered making this an example of a real world approximation of a vehicle driving in extensive rain.

MARIN Dam Break Simulation

Comparison of the rendered result simulated with PreonLab with real world video footage and experiment data. The validation scenario is specified in Kleefsman et al. “A volume-of-fluid based simulation method for wave impact problems“ published in the Journal of Computational Physics 206, 1 (2005). The real world pressure values described in the paper have been compared to the results computed in PreonLab.

Washing Machine

The simulation of home appliances of different kind is one of the many applications of PreonLab. The capability of PREON® to handle arbitrary complex geometries and trajectories makes it the right tool for the simulation of, e.g. washing machines or dishwashers. Although the showcased simulation was performed for 60 physical seconds, the fluid volume is preserved throughout the whole simulation. The preprocessing took only one hour and the simulation was performed in 12 hours on a standard Intel computer.

The post-processing tools included in PreonLab enable the engineer to perform analysis on the wetting of surfaces or the pressure force performed on the rigid objects.