Convective Heat Transfer: Flow around and through a body

Using SimScale Thermal
1

Hey everyone,

I’m working a project about a cooling airflow around a driving vehicle that is also used to cool components inside (by flowing through the vehicle as well). However, I just cannot seem to set it up correctly.

I’m not sure if this is even possible to run within SimScale, as I’ve only ever done work on simple 2D flows using Ansys. I’ve tried:

  • The car is a solid body with holes in the front and back to act as the inlet and outlet respectively. The flow domain is an enclosure around the car, and the velocity inlet/pressure outlet for the simulation is assigned to the enclosure. I get an error as its a multi-region analysis where a single-region is needed for convective heat transfer.

  • replace the inlet/outlet holes of the vehicle with surfaces and assign them as another pair of velocity inlet/pressure outlets, in addition to those assigned to the enclosure. This throws an error, I assume because I have another velocity inlet that is inside the flow domain?

  • I have not tried using an open inner region to extract a flow domain inside the vehicle instead of using an enclosure, otherwise I will not be able to capture the flow around the vehicle, including where the external flow meets the outlet of the vehicle.

Any help or similar projects that will assist me are greatly appreciated! Cheers!

2

Hi @mylesdjones!

I might misunderstand your way of approaching this problem, both internal and external flow analysis at the same time? You can either do one or another - that’s where the watertight aspect comes into play.

@cfd_squad - did any of you approach this kind of simulation at some point?

Cheers,

Jousef

4

Thank you for the response!

I suppose yes, both internal and external, as the flow should be cooling components inside the vehicle but I need to see the flow around the vehicle too.

So am I trying to do the impossible here? If there’s any way around this, I’d happily investigate. Perhaps I would have to do the internal flow and external flow seperately, but it was their interaction I was also hoping to capture.

Cheers