Exercise 15

Previous: Chapter 21 | Next: Exercise 16

This exercise teaches how to leverage an existing analysis to quickly and easily explore changes in your design.

Note: To improve cooling of the floor regions, we will explore a change in the duct design. This requires a change in the CAD model, so we begin by cloning the design.

1. Right click on the Baseline design in the Design Study Bar and select Clone…

2. Enter the name “Floor Registers Active” to the cloned design. Click OK.

Note: If launching from Pro/Engineer using the Mechanica mode, close Autodesk Simulation CFD.

3. In the CAD model, enable the features that allow air to flow to the front floor and the rear floor registers. In the console part (or console-r part for the right-drive configuration), activate the following features:

Autodesk® Inventor

Autodesk® Fusion

Instead of modifying the model in Autodesk® Fusion, we will change the material definition of the three floor-level ducts to air in Autodesk® Simulation CFD:

  1. Click Materials from the Setup tab.

  2. Hide the Car Body, Cabin Air, and Console parts to reveal the ducts.
  3. Select the three floor-level ducts:

  4. Assign Air:

Material DB Name = Default. Type = Fluid, Name = Air. Click Apply.

Please proceed to Step 6...

PTC Creo or Pro/Engineer

UG NX

Make console part (or console-r part) the working part and activate the part navigator. Check the box to enable each feature.

SolidWorks

Note: The objective of this design change is to eliminate the higher floor temperatures. We hope to do this by adding registers to provide cold air to the front and rear floor regions.

4. Launch Autodesk Simulation CFD and update the cloned design with the new CAD geometry:

To launch from CAD...

  1. In the Design Study Manager, expand the car design study.
  2. Select the Floor Registers Active design.
  3. Click Update Design.

5. In the Design Study Bar, note that there is a lost Air material setting. Right click on it and click Delete.

Note: Why? In the Baseline configuration, Autodesk Simulation CFD generated three distinct air volumes (primary cabin volume, inlet, and an isolated volume in the console). When we added the rear floor registers, the third isolated region became part of the main cabin, and the Air material assigned to that part could not be assigned. It is therefore considered "lost," and has to be deleted before we can run this design.

Important: Before proceeding, you should check the settings of the model to ensure that they are assigned in the correct locations. You should inspect the material and boundary condition assignments, in particular, and fix any settings that are not assigned to the correct part or surface.

6. Right click off the model and choose Solve…

7. Set Continue From to 0 and click Solve.

8. When prompted if you want to delete all results after iteration 0 and continue, click Yes.

Note: The simulation should take approximately 20 minutes to complete, but your time may vary, depending upon your computer.
Note: At the conclusion of the simulation, the Convergence Plot closes, and the following appears in the Message Window: “Analysis completed successfully."

End of Exercise

Previous: Chapter 21 | Next: Exercise 16

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Parent topic: Self-Paced Fundamentals Training