Week Eight

With our time at Oakland University starting to wind down, Morgan and I spent a great deal of time this week organizing data in order to implement it in our paper and poster presentation. Along with this work we attended an interesting lecture on internal combustion engines given by Dr. Zhao, a new professor at Oakland University who graduated from Princeton. Additionally, we attended a poster presentation workshop given by Dr. Dean, where he covered the Do's and Don'ts and other guidelines for giving an effective poster research presentation. This workshop came at a great time, as the MID-SURE Undergraduate Research Conference is being held at Michigan State University on July 27, less than 2 weeks away!

With all that being said, there was still plenty of research going on in our little Dodge Hall enclave. We generated some good plots that illustrates and compares the hydraulic jumps of our three cases. Below is some delicious eye candy, courtesy of Morgan Jones.

Here we are looking at the edge of the impingement area in a region between two streams. This bubble-like formation is a hydraulic jump. Also, notice how the distance progressively gets larger and larger away from the origin. This is just showing that given a higher flow rate, the impingement area is bigger.

Intermission time. Whilst perusing the Internets for a CFD question we were interested in, I found a thread on a CFD help forum with a few CFD-related jokes, if you could imagine there would be such a thing! A few sardonic individuals came up with some quippy mnemonics for CFD that I thought I would share with you:

CFD - Colorful Figure Delivery

CFD - Colors for Directors

CFD - Cleverly Forged Data

You can't deny that there isn't at least a small bit of truth to these...

Back to business! As we defined at the beginning of the summer research, one of the most important things we wanted to look at was the impingement area for the three cases. That is, given a certain flow rate, how big is the impingement area going to be and how much is that going to cool down the piston? Below is a graph comparing the impingement areas for our three cases:

Quantitatively speaking, the 1.0 LPM case's impingement area is 57% larger than the 0.5 LPM case. Furthermore, the 1.5 LPM case area is 69.8% and 166.5% larger than the 1.0 and 0.5 LPM cases, respectively. In short, if you squirt more oil at the bottom of the bottom of the piston, the more the piston will get cooled down. However, it's not that simple as there are other important parameters to look at; such as possible oil misting and parasitic engines losses from the oil pump. Further research is being done (though not currently by us) on how much oil is ideal for cooling down pistons.

Well, folks, that's it for this week. Be sure to come back next week for more exciting CFD news from Dodge Hall!