Conference Schedule

10.30 – 11.00

MAN Energy Solutions SE | Sebastian Spengler

Investigation on oil and air interactions at sealing areas of a turbomachinery using MPS+FVM two-way coupled simulation approaches

Turbomachinery often uses plain bearings for the axial and radial bearings with oil as lubricant. This type of bearing provide a robust and cost efficient solution. Already current applications require tight sealing systems protecting the flow area of the turbomachinery from the oiled area around the bearings. In this study a two-way coupled approach of MPS and FVM is used to simulate the strong interaction between oil and air in the sealing area that protects the compressor side of a turbocharger from oil. As these simulation are beyond the state of the art a verification approach with a demonstrator was investigated showing good agreement with the simulation. Beside the positive results the challenges with regard to hardware an modelling are also part of the study.

Topics: turbomachinery, LUBRICATION, TEMPERATURE

OTHER AUTHORS: Stefan Rost, MAN Energy Solutions SE, Germany | Gianluca Parma, EnginSoft, Italy | Riccardo Sala, EnginSoft, Italy

11.45 – 12.15

Ceratizit Luxembourg S.à.r.l. | Lucas Salzinger

Tooling a Sustainable Future

After announcing Ceratizit's official strategy transition towards sustainability, the company must now reshape its global positioning accordingly. The R&D department is deeply involved in rethinking its products, considering everything from materials and coatings to geometries. In this process, it became apparent that product development needs to embrace new methodologies that align more closely with the global strategy. Strategic simulation emerges as a key leverage point, aiming to provide crucial insights through adapted simulation models. In our quest for digital solutions, Particleworks has emerged as the ideal choice for coolant simulation, now integrated into our product development process. Whether exploring new cooling strategies or enhancing existing technologies, this software has supported us, granting access to new insights in the field. After two years of fruitful collaboration and high-quality support from Particleworks Europe, we are thrilled to showcase some of our most innovative cooling solutions at an event honoring our software provider.

Topic: MACHINING TOOLS COOLING

12.15 – 12.45

SKF Industrie | Mehul Pandya and Fabrizio Mandrile

Predicting lubricant behaviour and temperatures in ball bearings

Lubrication in bearing is crucial to ensure smooth operation, to minimise friction and wear, to prevent corrosion and to dissipate heat generated during operation thereby extending bearing life. CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) ensures effective lubrication in bearing by providing valuable insights that physical tests alone cannot achieve. However, CFD simulations are time consuming, often it takes weeks to achieve an accurate representation of the fluid churning in a rotating bearing. Computational time even increases when solving the heat flow combined with the fluid flow.
Particle-based meshless fluid dynamics simulation software operates without mesh generation, significantly reducing the time spent on preprocessing the simulation model. It also excels in precisely capturing the free surface flows, handles complex boundary conditions and so it is suitable for moving parts like bearings. This article presents methods to improve the prediction and understanding of the lubricant behaviour and the heat transfer for an identified, common ball bearing. It addresses this matter by using two approaches (1) Analysing the oil behaviour using particle-based method and coupling it with FE for performing steady state thermal analysis-Segregated approach. (2) Performing conjugate heat transfer (CHT) analysis directly within the particle-based simulation sw to directly compute the bearing temperatures-Coupled approach.
The objective of this comparison is to assess the simulation time, accuracy and to determine best practice for thermal simulations. In the segregated approach, the oil churning is first calculated, then used to map the heat transfer coefficients at the fluid-solid interfaces. These mapped heat transfer coefficients are taken as input for a FE model which calculates the bearing temperatures. However, the particle-based simulation sw also has an inbuilt solver coupling convection and conduction, which is used to directly calculate the bearing temperatures by solving the conjugate heat transfer analysis using coupled approach. Both these methods are relevant in an application conceptual stage where rapid design changes are required. Further comparison is provided against a traditional CFD method and physical tests. It is observed that, one way approach is faster and closer to test results for the approximations taken. Coupled approach (CHT) is more reliable when there is a requirement to get temperature distribution in oil with varying loads.

Topics: BEARINGS, LUBRICATION, THERMAL ANALYSIS

14.00 – 14.30

EnginSoft, Riccardo Sala | FunctionBay, Uwe Eiselt

Soft closure systems: Fluid Structure Interaction by Moving Particle Simulation and Full-Flex Multi-body analysis

Soft closure systems are found in our houses and offices and make our pieces of furniture more comfortable, silent and long-lasting. Closure dampening is based on deformable pistons moving in a closed housing filled with a viscous liquid. The motion of the piston in a fluid dissipates part of the kinetic energy during the closure process. The dampening is the result of different phenomena, related to the deformability of the piston, fluid pressure and viscous dissipations due to the fluid flow in narrow gaps. Simulating the fluid flow and calculating the forces acting on the undeformed piston is a simple task for any good CFD software, but considering the deformation of the piston under the fluid action, and simulating the complete closure of gaps is way more complicated. The complete simulation of these phenomena requires coupling and co-simulation of a CFD and an FEA tool, with a 2-way fluid-structure-interaction. The CFD software must be able to handle complete closure of gaps and contacts between bodies initially separated. The FEA model has to include the non-linear behavior of the materials and large deformations under the fluid forces. Moreover the simulation process must be easy to set-up and numerically stable, so that it can be used for industrial applications. This presentation explains how these modelling challenges have been tackled and solved with the Moving Particle Simulation software Particleworks coupled to the full-flex multi-body solver RecurDyn. The results of the co-simulation are presented and compared with experimental data.

Topic: Fluid-Structure Interaction

16.00 – 16.30

HES-SO Valais/Wallis | Jean Decaix

Simulation of a Pelton turbine performance

The simulation of the ow in a Pelton turbine is a challenging task for mesh based methods due to the air/water mixture and the rotation of the runner. Meshless based methods are better suited for such flows and take advantage of the GPU architecture to speed up the calculation. Simulations of a Pelton turbine are carried out using the software Particleworks based on the Moving Particle Simulation, which is a meshless method. The efficiency drop due to the "falaise" effect and the erosion of the splitter are computed and compared with either experimental measurements or the literature. The results show that this method is able to capture the tendency of the efficiency drop in agreement with the available data and at a lower computational cost than the mesh based methods. These encouraging results should motivate the community to test and validate such an approach.

Topic: PELTON TURBINE