Week Three

The friendly computer folks at OU had an interesting sense of humor when they created the university's servers. After naming the servers after the members of the Beatles, server users now have the choice to use either Paul, Ringo, Harrison or Lennon--each with different computing attributes. Depending on our research needs, we will choose different servers to conduct our simulations. However, when all the servers are down, as was frequently the case this week, we were unable to get very far in generating new data. With the data that we did generate, much of it (on my end, mostly) was determined to be unusable as Fluent autosaved the data as .cdat and .cgns file types, instead of the readable .dat file type. After learning how to prevent this from happening the hard way, we were able to get back on track merely hours before the servers went down (again).

Besides data and server issues, we did happen to make some good progress. For one, after copious amounts of meticulous work, we were able to generate a pretty good mesh that will be used for our next set of simulations. For these simulations, we are modeling the piston to be at mid-stroke (further away from the jet nozzle), instead of at the bottom of its stroke where our current simulations are taking place. Additionally, we calculated the jet impingement areas for the 3.64 and 7.35 m/s 60°C cases. We did this using a feature called Iso-Clip, which we used to cut out the area in which there wasn't any oil present (the blue area in the picture below) and subtracted that from the total area of the piston in order to obtain the effective impingement area (the red area with a greenish border). We then compared this calculation to the experimental data generated by Gary Liu, a PhD student worked on this project in years past.

Picture of the Impingement Area on the bottom of the piston. This was gathered by analyzing the Volume Fraction of Oil in the Cylinder

For your enjoyment, below are a few pictures of the mesh Morgan worked so tirelessly on. Making a mesh in ANSYS is a lot easier said than done!