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)

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.

Flood simulation

Climate change is one of the most central problems of today’s mankind. With PreonLab it is possible to perform 3D flood simulation even for large domains in high resolution. Usually in this environment, engineers have to work with poor data representations of the surface which have usually been generated from point clouds and 3D scans. PreonLab robustly handles even poor mesh representations and is not relying on normalized mesh data. This makes PreonLab the right choice for CFD in environmental engineering.

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.

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.

PreonLab promotion video

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

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.

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.

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.

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.