Transcript
Transcript
We’ll briefly look at the changes and additions that were made. The first one was to the fuel Inlet plenum, and it was specifically adding this what I called main support segment so that the nTop structure would be self-supporting.The support segment was generated from a simple cone, and each of the parameters are driven by either the CAD or various implicit variables within the rest of the model. For instance, the points are controlled by the outlet plenum, or excuse me, the outlet pipe, and in specific the chamfer location of this outlet pipe. So, the center of this chamfer location plus some additional height for the cone. So those give us both points one and points two for our cone.If we look at just the cone here, and I’ll turn the design space on as well, the outer radius of the cone is driven by the location of the ellipsoid, and in specific the ellipse location minus half the ellipse radius. So this will always put it right at this edge. And the ID of this cone is driven by, let me turn the actual cone on, the ID of the cone here in blue is driven by the support angle that we wish the object to take and is governed by then the other parameters that define its location. So its proximity to the ellipsoid, as well as the cone height.So let me turn on the hex core, and I’ll turn on the main segment. And so for instance, I’ll hit, uh, I’ll pause the auto run here. Let’s presume our ellipsoid location moves outwards to, I don’t know, 24 mm. The radius stays the same, and maybe we want our support angle to drop to 40°. Uh, each of these parameters now drive this main support segment, and thereby will always be parametrically driven by the rest of the design.This main support segment, you might have noticed, was incorporated into the design space. So I’ll hide the volume and turn on our design space. It was just Boolean unioned into the structure so that we’re able to make our support structure part of the design itself, rather than having to worry about removing extra material or lattice structures.The last major change regarding this support structure was to the flow pipe, or the outlet flow pipe. All I did was a simple Boolean Subtract from the outlet pipe, so I removed this volume to change my support pipe. I’ll turn the cross-section a little different here, so that the fuel when it’s ultimately funneled down and through, comes straight into the pipe as opposed to getting trapped on the outside over here.The baffle volumes and associated geometries were all updated so that the proper pathways are either blocked or controlled. So here’s the fuel or the oil Outlet baffle. So it now extends down through the rest of the design space.The next change was adding the what I called oil funnel. This was done by simply, I’ll turn just the hex core on, by taking a cylinder. The height and location of the cylinder are derived from the centroid of the infill volume, as well as the top of the fuel Inlet plenum. So wherever this ellipsoid moves to, the cylinder will shift as needed.Then I use a compound block or custom block that’s called Double Curvature in the XY plane. All this does is curves the object. So in this case, I’ll turn that, uh, turn the curvature on, and we’ll see there’s a slight curve to here. If I copy and paste this, the smaller the value, the more pronounced the curvature will be. It’s effectively a paraboloid, and the larger it is, the smaller the curvature. I just needed a little bit, so I just went with a pretty arbitrary value. This curved value then I do a Boolean Subtract with just a random large cylinder that moves through the center.I’ll describe that here in a second further. And then just as a test, we Boolean Intersect that funnel with the hot fluid because we want the oil to be funneled down and around. And then we take this main oil segment and we Boolean Union it to the cold Inlet Baffle. This was the original baffle. I did a Boolean Subtract with that large cylinder that we saw, or Boolean Intersect, excuse me, to give us this structure here. And then we Union the funnel segment to the original baffle volume, and then this obviously gets intersected with the hot fluid.So now we have, if I turn on the hex core and we’ll look at a cross-section, the hot oil flows down, hits this funnel, and continues to traverse down and exit out the center pipe. The main reason I created such a large what I call the funnel trimmer here was to always make sure my Boolean Subtract or Intersect would capture both the funnel and the original plenum. The reason being is if I turn on the original inlet baffle volume, we could have just Unioned our funnel to the original plenum, but this still would have created entrapped either powder between these two segments here, or we would have had to infill it with solid material, increasing the weight. I removed this by doing that Boolean Intersect.And so now the fuel can enter both the hot and cold channels up until it hits this point just to preserve the integrity of the part rather than adding large sections of material. And again, all of this is parametrically we could say driven by the incoming Tad geometry, as well as the rest of our plenum geometry. So we can come to the fuel in plenum, and again, we’ll change, we’ll go back to the original value we had, let’s say, in the ellipse location of 21 and a support angle of 45. That oil funnel is going to shift accordingly as well as the main support segment.The next step is going to be evaluating these structures, specifically the fluid domains. We’ll look at analyses both in Ansys Discovery as well as Ansys Fluent, and hopefully later on I’ll be able to tack on some other CFD packages, but we’ll primarily focus on just those two CFD solvers for both the hot and cold final fluid domains.