ParaView Mass Flow Rate
 

Hi

I am currently doing some CFD on an air intake system for a combustion engine, I am trying to find the best intake shape to get an even mass flow into each piston. I've created the mesh and geometry in Salome and run icoFoam in OpenFoam. The next thing I am looking to do is to find the mass flow rate from each outlet in ParaView.

I have done a search on this forum and on Google but I haven't found an answer to my question.

At the moment I am "clipping" through various planes leaving the outer cells of the outlet. At this stage is it possible to only select cells on the outlet boundary? As at the moment I am using the extract selected filter, and it is very hard to just select the cells on the boundary.

Then I am using the calculator filter to create an array of rho*U_Y cell values (the y axis is normal to the outlet boundary). Then using the integrate variables filter this array is integrated across the selected cells to give a mass flow rate(I am assuming that the integrate filter integrates across the cells form the extract filter only). This method gave me a reasonable value for one piston but for the other 3 it gave values much too low.

Is this method correct? I am assuming that the calculator and integrate filters only work on the cells selected from the extract selected filter. This method seems to be very long winded and tedious, especially when selecting the cells for the boundary, is there a possibility of automating some of this process? As I will be varying the geometry I can see this becoming a tiresome task.

Does anybody know of any ParaView tutorials on topics similar to this? As the ParaView wiki and user guide doesn't seems to cover any of the topics I am using.

Thanks