This presentation was made at CAASE18, The Conference on Advancing Analysis & Simulation in Engineering. CAASE18 brought together the leading visionaries, developers, and practitioners of CAE-related technologies in an open forum, to share experiences, discuss relevant trends, discover common themes, and explore future issues.

Resource Abstract

Nowadays CFD simulations (both simple and advanced) are carried out solely by experts through the whole design process and development phase. However, the available number of the CFD experts is limited especiallyin the pre-development phase. During this phase the CFD experts have to investigate several scenarios which differ usually in only some parameters for example in velocity or temperature. Such processes are very time demanding and ending in a non-efficient R&D process. What if the CFD tasks could be “extended” to other members of the R&D process with minor effort? Thus, the effort for a preliminary investigation could be allocated among several team members and boost the design phase. Such involvement of experts from other fields like CAD designers can be realized by applying predefined workflows. These workflows have to be initially developed by a CFD expert and their use has to be intuitive.

This paper demonstrates an example of a workflow to realize this concept. As case study electric motors are selected and more specific the design of the motor’s housing. Electric motors generate heat during their operation as a result of both electrical and mechanical losses. This emitted heat is essential to be removed in order to ensure the proper operation of the motor. The dissipation of the heat is achieved in most cases through conductive cooling (housing of the motor). To increase the outer heat exchange surface between the housing and the cooling medium usually fins are placed on the housing. Apart from their power electric motors may differ in the housing geometry (i.e. dimension, number and size of the fins etc). Thus, each motor should be designed and computed separately to investigate its cooling process. However, the "physics" of the problem is the same for these cases. Thus, the preliminary evaluation of the motor housing ends to become a highly time consuming numerical method. Aim of the current work is to demonstrate a workflow from a 3D parametric CAD file till the visualization of the CFD results.