[DrDan]

Greetings,

I'm Daniel and as you can see, I'm new to cfd-online. I'm also pretty new to OpenFOAM and CFD in general. I didn't learn fluid dynamics during my study, so all the mathematics concerning this is beyond my horizon atm. I'm trying to get to know OpenFOAM and CFD by trial-and-error.
But now I'm stuck.

My company produces woven wire mesh and we are trying to simulate those meshes in context. Means e.g. how our mesh will perform when build into a system. Simulating a complete mesh inside a system goes beyond our computational capacities and the time we want to spend.

My idea was to replace the mesh inside the simulated system by something that is easier to calculate and performs pretty similar. A porous zone came to my mind.

Since I didn't know how to set up the parameters for a porous zone so that it would give similar results to our meshes, I build a simple tube with a 5 mm porous zone in the middle. By calculating the speed at the outlet, I thought to get some kind of calibration curve. I need this because the only value I have from our meshes is the air permeability. That's the amount of air passing through our mesh at a given pressure drop (200 Pa). It's measured in l/(m²*s) and it's a standardized test for woven meshes.

So I build the tube, meshed it and set up OpenFOAM to use the 'rhoPorousMRFPimpleFoam' solver. Unfortunately that didn't work. I could use the values I copied from the rhoPorousMRFSimpleFoam tutorial, but whenever I change the Darcy values inside constant/porousZone, the solver crashes before completing the calculation.

Does anyone have a tip on how to simulate a mesh on a large scale? Maybe there is a more simple way besides using a porous zone for it.