Engrana's Effective Utilization of SpaceClaim in CFD Analysis
Technology Category
- Sensors - Flow Meters
- Sensors - Liquid Detection Sensors
Applicable Industries
- Consumer Goods
- Equipment & Machinery
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Virtual Prototyping & Product Testing
- Virtual Reality
About The Customer
Engrana LLC, established in 2009, is a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and thermal analysis consulting firm founded by Bill Wangard, Ph.D. The company specializes in complex fluid flow problems involving mass transfer, multiphase flow, chemical vapor deposition, and external aerodynamics. Engrana serves a variety of medium- and large-sized companies as their virtual CFD analyst, employing commercial and open source CFD software such as ANSYS FLUENT, COMSOL, and OpenFOAM. In addition, Engrana develops customized mathematical lumped-model solutions using mathematical tools such as EES and MATLAB. The company's customers span a diverse spectrum of industries, including consumer goods, electrical power transformers, construction materials, pharmaceutical, and CVD reactors.
The Challenge
Engrana, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and thermal analysis consulting firm, faced a significant challenge in preparing customer-supplied geometries for analysis. Clients would typically provide CAD files of solid geometry, which often contained many details that were not relevant to the flow analysis. The process of de-featuring and simplifying the solid geometry, as well as decomposing the geometry to produce high-quality hex-dominant meshes, was a complex and time-consuming task. Before the introduction of SpaceClaim, the responsibility of geometry de-featuring was primarily left to the clients, making the cleanup process a difficult and iterative task. Furthermore, clients often wanted to explore the sensitivity of the CFD solution to geometrical changes, which required a tool that could easily incorporate these changes with minimal effort.
The Solution
Engrana adopted SpaceClaim as a key tool for preparing solid geometry for CFD analysis. SpaceClaim allowed Engrana to de-feature and simplify the solid geometry, as well as decompose the geometry to produce high-quality hex-dominant meshes. It also enabled the extraction of flow volumes from the solid geometry, freeing clients from the burden of geometry cleanup. Additionally, SpaceClaim was used to perform CFD optimization studies. It made it easy to incorporate geometry changes with very little effort, allowing design variants to be solved in sequence to determine the optimal solution with respect to the changes of the parameter. This greatly aided in the optimization of the design. SpaceClaim was also integrated into Engrana's workflow, allowing the manipulation and modification of clients’ geometry directly, thereby eliminating time-consuming iteration loops.
Operational Impact
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