Problem with natural ventilation

Using SimScale Post-processing
1

Hi all, I have a problem with post-processing the results with natural ventilation.
I would be interested in understanding the flow rate of air passing through an opening.
The problem is that if I do area integral, rightly this returns zero because everything that goes in comes out of the same opening.
Is there any way to figure out solely the flow rate that goes in?
I was thinking of exporting the velocities for each cell so that then through a spreadsheet I could take for example only the positive ones and thus calculate the flow rate coming in.
Thank you all

2

Hi @s289286,

Thanks for posting your question!
Maybe an input from my side would be using area average instead of integral, once it will be getting you the scalar average passing through the face. Have you already tried that one?
For more information, please take a look at that article:

I also would like to ask you for the project link, just to take a look at your project and then search for some casual issue in the setup.

best,

3

Thank you for your reply
I haven’t done the project yet because I wanted to understand this issue well first .
If I do area area avarage as you suggested however I don’t think I always get zero or an unrealistic figure of the flow rate passing through the aperture since on the same surface I will have positive and negative velocities.

4

Hello there,

In addition to what Vinicius mentioned, using a third-party software like Paraview can indeed help you analyze entering and exiting flow rates. A quick summary in Paraview would be,

  • Start by exporting the results from SimScale’s post-processor by using Download,
  • Open results in Paraview.
  • Extract data from the surface of interest.
  • Convert cell data to point data.
  • Generate surface normals.
  • File > Save Data
  • Filter data based on flow direction whether it’s exiting or entering the domain - this would require a conditional statement.
  • Calculate volumetric flow rate using Paraview’s Integrate Variables tool or your own integration method.

All operations could be performed in Paraview environment without the need of saving data, but you would need to use, for example, Python Calculator to determine cells with entering or exiting flow.

I hope this would be helpful,
Best.

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