Every single mechanical engineer has to study a subject called mechanics. Some call it MOM, some call it SOM, some call it EM. But whatever you may call it, it's always there and it's always the same. This subject tells us how to decide whether our design will fail or not. And it is a very complex subject. And the bad news is, we only study this until we get familiar with the concept of Simulation. Once you start doing simulations, there is no going back. I had a glimpse of simulation very early in my college life, way before it would have according to my syllabus. And then I got myself involved in another project that made me understand simulation to a very great extend. This was the design and manufacturing of HAWT. Basically, we were trying to make a hybrid wind turbine that can produce electricity safely inside a crowded city. And the very first step included the Fluent based simulations. Actually, the first step was a literature review, but yeah you got the point. So, my s...
Every single mechanical engineer has to study a subject called mechanics. Some call it MOM, some call it SOM, some call it EM. But whatever you may call it, it's always there and it's always the same. This subject tells us how to decide whether our design will fail or not. And it is a very complex subject. And the bad news is, we only study this until we get familiar with the concept of Simulation. Once you start doing simulations, there is no going back.
I had a glimpse of simulation very early in my college life, way before it would have according to my syllabus. And then I got myself involved in another project that made me understand simulation to a very great extend. This was the design and manufacturing of HAWT. Basically, we were trying to make a hybrid wind turbine that can produce electricity safely inside a crowded city. And the very first step included the Fluent based simulations. Actually, the first step was a literature review, but yeah you got the point.
So, my senior told me everything he knew about this software and we started working on a design that could give maximum torque with minimum wind speeds. We made different blade geometries, imported numerous airfoil shapes, and tested each one of them for our working speeds inside Fluent. And long story short, we came up with a device that was reaching about 100 RPM at a wind speed of 4m/s. Which was quite impressive, considering the fact that this was only half of the design.
This project made me understand one very important thing. No matter how much you learn or understand, there is always more to learn. And also, no matter how good you are at simulations, Your initial simulations will always be wrong. And also, doing the same simulation twice will vary the results so much that you will think that it's better to do hand calculations than FEM based simulation. Maybe this was the reason that I had to shift from Ansys Fluent to Solidworks for my flow simulations.
Image: Slow Simulation of 4-blade Savonius Turbine in Solidworks.
Here's a screenshot of my Solidworks simulation. We used a very simple approach for this project. We started understanding all the parameters required for a turbine (Aspect Ratio, Number of Blades, Geometry of Blades, etc). And afterwards we started optimizing each of these parameters one by one.
Here's a link to the final report: Report.
And I had done tens of these on Ansys Fluent (maybe hundred), and tens on Solidworks before finalizing the results. Simulation is an overwhelming process, but believe me the satisfaction on reaching the right result is totally worth the effort. I have spent hours and hours on Ansys and Abaqus for months. I have worked with Ansys for a year and a half. But even now, I have to number of simulations to get the result. I wish I could find the image or video of the wind turbine working. But I couldn't even post it after that since this was a project started by my college, not by me. Anyways, FEM simulation is one of the best yet the worst thing you will learn as a Mechanical Engineer.
Comments
Post a Comment