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Elgin: Simulated Water Intake

Solutions for Industrial Use

Challenge

Simulating complex geometric patterns for water intake screens.

Calibrating the porous media boundary condition to reflect actual geometry.

Designing critical infrastructure with no prototyping stage.

tee screen water intake

Results

Designs tailored to each individual project.

Optimized performance to limit hydraulic losses through the system.

Faster design and delivery of critical equipment.

pressure drop visualization

Founded in 1864 in Elgin, Illinois, Elgin Separation Solutions has evolved into a worldwide leader in the design, manufacturing, and service of specialized processing equipment in the Oil & Gas, Mining, Coal, Aggregates, Minerals, Rendering, Dredging, Water, and Pipeline Construction industries. Elgin is an innovative turn-key solutions provider of natural resource recycling, liquid/solid separation, product classification, dewatering, waste management, and material handling operations that solve challenging real-world problems on-site.

Industries served by Elgin Separation Systems
Industries served by Elgin Separation Systems.

Elgin Water Intake Solutions

Elgin’s water intake division offers solutions designed to deliver water to industrial systems in a way that is both efficient and environmentally safe. The intake equipment is the first line of defense for the safety and performance of municipal, industrial, irrigation, and processing equipment’s hydro intake. Intake screens are a critical component that keep marine life safe and protect pumps and turbines from harmful debris whilst maintaining design flow rates at the required pressure. Intake screens come in many types including:

  • Copper Nickel Solutions.
  • Coanda Screens.
  • Cylindrical Screens.
  • Flat Panel Screens.
  • Side Hill Screens.
  • Screen Cleaning Systems.
copper nickel circular water intake screen
A Copper Nickel Circular water intake screen manufactured by Elgin Water Intake.

Daniel Bonavita, Application Engineer at Elgin Water Solutions, has been working for three years as a designer in Elgin’s water intake division and works with customers on the front end of their intake design to ensure the water processing equipment has the required intake performance.

The SimScale team helped us refine our workflow so that we get the information we need more efficiently, and they are always available to answer unique questions as they come up. Even for our team members who had never used CFD before, the training quickly got them to a point where they felt comfortable with the software. Looking to the future, we already have a handful of new products that we know will require the use of SimScale to prove the concept and refine the design without having to build physical prototypes.

daniel bonavita

Daniel Bonavita

Applications Engineer at Elgin Water Intake Solutions

The Water Intake team designs water intake screening equipment that serves as the first line of defense for an intake system. The main constraint with intake screens is the environmental regulations with regard to suction velocities through intakes. After modeling the equipment in Autodesk Inventor, they use SimScale incompressible analysis (CFD) to optimize the flow distribution across screen surfaces. The team has used the porous media feature to simplify the screen media physical representation and then iterate through different baffle pipe designs to fine-tune the velocity distribution to meet project requirements. They also study the pressure drop through the components, and on projects with strict requirements can refine the shape of the assemblies to significantly lower the head loss. Daniel and the team are able to create solutions individually tailored for more complex projects.

Custom-Made Water Intake Designs

A recent municipal water supply project in North Carolina, USA, required a custom Tee Screen design for which CFD simulation in SimScale was extensively used to validate the flow distribution and head loss across the components. The tee screens had an intake capacity of 22.5 mgd. The model shown in the images has a porous media volume that represents a complex screen layout used to prevent unwanted materials from entering the main water flow.

tee screen water intake
A custom Tee Screen water intake.
tee circular intake side view
Side view of the Tee Circular intake (flow is from left to right). The water enters the circular screen and moves upwards through the pipe.
pressure drop visualization
Pressure drop visualization using the particle trace function in SimScale.

Being able to lean on SimScale’s servers for our CFD analysis has saved us countless hours. With the high demands of this analysis type, we would often have to just sit and wait while the computer worked through the simulation. Having the cloud do the work lets us complete other tasks while SimScale works in the background.

daniel bonavita

Daniel Bonavita

Applications Engineer at Elgin Water Intake Solutions

Set up your own cloud-native simulation via the web in minutes by creating an account on the SimScale platform. No installation, special hardware, or credit card is required.

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