Dynamic Mesh for a Gear Pump
 

Hi all. My name is Alejandro Roger Ull. This spring I've been working on my final project for my aerospace engineering degree. I did a study on how to work with dynamic meshes in OpenFOAM, in particular for its application to a gear pump simulation. I want to share my work with you, so that anyone that may find it helpful can access to it.

Gear Pump Animation

The work consists on meshing the geometry with snappyHexMesh in parallel and extruding it with extrudeMesh to make it two-dimensional. Then a custom boundary condition for the movement of the mesh is created. Finally the simulation is run in parallel, by generating an initial mesh, moving it as much as possible, up to acceptable limits of deformation, and finally replacing it with a new mesh. Everything is completely automated.

You can download the document here. (2.63 MB) (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)
Also, all the files I used can be downloaded here. (9.12 MB) (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

If you have any comments feel free to post them here.

Hi TRT,
You did a good job and thanks for sharing. I am about to do a moving mesh simulation in ANSYS Workbench and I am new to it. So i am trying to gather some info. The gear pump u described is similar to what i am looking at, even though the principles are a bit different. I wanted to know whether you did a similar mesh in ANSYS Meshing?

Thanks!
Jimmy

Nice job, thank you for sharing!

Hey Jimmy, unfortunately I do not have a clue about how to do this with ANSYS Workbench, so I can't help you. Thanks for your interest anyways.

Hi Jimmy, you may want to look at http://www.adina.com/newsgH107.shtml for a FSI gear pump analysis

So can ADINA simulate the inner flow of gear pump in 3D?

Gear Pump analysis
 

Hi shanxuewenjdx, Yes it can. The other examples on the webpage are 3D eg the flow meter. Exactly the same capabilities are used.

hello Alejandro
could yu please send me the complete pdf?
thanks.
force.of.love@gmail.com

There is a download button on my first post, and then another one on the dropbox webpage (top right).

I am very happy to see your share, cause I'm going to do an analysis just like that, but I'm in China, there are some reasons to block me from downloading those files by clicking the URL you give, would you please send me the PDF and case files in a zip?

My email: jianli.bjfu@163.com

Thank you!

hi,
can you send your results to me?
I need it immediately for my final project.
kind regards,
behnam Akhoondian
b.akhoondian@gmail.com

hi sparkbjfu,
did U finished your project? if U completed it,can you tell me how you changed the trt's geometry to your own geometry?
best regards,

Nice work!

Thank you for sharing!

Gear pump and moving mesh tutorial with custom BC
 

Excellent tutorial, you even go through the stumbling blocks in the process. Thank you very much for sharing

Hi Alejandro Roger Ull,

I was curious if the same problem can be solved using immersed boundary method in openFoam?

Thank you for sharing.

I know little about the immersed boundary method (I've only read about it because of your post), but, as far as I know, I don't think it will work. It seems to me that the immersed boundary method is useful when your boundary moves because of the flow, in response to fluid forces (correct me if I'm wrong). But in this case the movement of the gears is known.

Also, take into account that the movement involved in the gear pump is so extreme that probably re-meshing is always needed at some point. You can try to separate the zone with large movements from other steady zones and then stick them together, so that you only have to re-mesh a smaller volume, in order to use less computational power.

Thank you all for your interest in my work.

Alejandro

Hi,

I was curious because Ansys CFX uses the immersed boundary method to solve for flows around a lobe compressor which is basically same as a gear pump.

Anyway, that project is scrapped now since OpenFOAM doesn't support immersed boundary methods.

Hi TRT,

do you think that this will work for complex 3D simulations too? Its kind a hard work for such a job. I am interested in simulation of screw blower...


http://www.industriezeitschrift.de/g...er_element.jpg