CFD on a simple moving engine

shreen

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to model fluid flow through the intake and exhaust ports and poppet valves of a simple single cylinder IC engine and need a little advice.

I'm using Solidworks' CosmosFlowWorks which doesn't allow for a dynamic analysis whilst the piston is in motion. One suggestion so far has been to split up the cycle into a finite number of 'snapshots' of the fluid flow at various crank angles.

Is this a common method utilised by professional engineers using CFD? I'm an undergraduate and totally new to CFD too, but that idea seems a little flawed as it will not take into account the volume of gas already inside the cylinder from the previous snapshot - can these values be put in manually?

Any other problems with this method of splitting up a dynamic system into lots of static ones? I get the feeling I'm missing something because it seems so simple!

Thankyou!