[mullenc525]

Hi,

I'm having difficulty analyzing a transition I am designing for a manifold. I am attempting to evenly distribute gas flow from a 50mm dia pipe to a 20x100mm rectangular cross section in the shortest distance possible. This cross section then tapers into a porous domain (green) which models many channels in a heat exchanger. To do so I am using vanes (blue lines) to direct the flow and stop it from separating off the walls. The difficulty I am having is efficiently analyzing this geometry in CFD. Since the vanes are thin, they require a very small mesh to capture the detail at the beginning and end of the vane itself.

I don't believe the thickness of the vane needs to be modeled to obtain an accurate solution - is there a way to create a zero thickness surface in the middle of the volume, which can subsequently be inflated and otherwise treated as a wall?

I am using solidworks - can also use designmodeler. I've tried extruding the vanes as surfaces within the model then importing to ansys, hoping the surfaces could be selected and set up as walls, but the model will not import. I presume there is a common solution to this problem as vanes are everywhere, but I cannot find anything.

Thanks!

[stumpy]

The shared face where two solid bodies meet can be used for zero thickness baffles/vanes. So slice up your geometry so that you have multiple solids, with one face of the solid representing the vanes (the other faces of the solid won't be assigned boundary conditions, so the flow will pass straight through, hence it doesn't matter where they are).

[mullenc525]

of course, thanks!

edit - hmm. What is the best way to do this in solidworks? The split command doesn't seem appropriate as it divides the part into multiple files. Also split requires surfaces which was causing me problems earlier when I tried to load volumes with internal surfaces into ansys.