3D Fluid Simulation
Knowledge of the behavior of air flows in buildings, vehicles or system components is essential for high-performance and efficient operation. In this context, numerical flow simulation (computational fluid dynamics, CFD) has become an indispensable tool in addition to experimental investigations due to continuously improved methods.
Today, the wide range of applications of flow simulation allows it to make a significant contribution to development progress in building and room air conditioning technology.
For the various research topics at our institute, the different simulation methods are optimally used and adapted for the current problems. The application ranges from aerosol dispersion and simulation of indoor air flows to component optimization and calculation of complete systems and buildings. The complexity of the investigation can be increased from simple laminar pipe flow to polyphase flow or flow-acoustic prediction.
In order to apply the widest possible range of methods, we use the two most commonly used simulation packages STAR-CCM+ and ANSYS. For smoke and fire simulations we use FDS. In addition, for combined problems we applay coupled simulations from 1D models, which are exported, for example, from Modelica or Python as a Functional Mock-up Unit (FMU) and integrated into the CFD simulation via Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI). In this way, the interactions between flow and components or its controller can be mapped. The coupling of CFD simulations and the thermophysiological comfort model Noodle (developed at EBC) enable us to calculate time-resolved and locally for individual body parts the thermal comfort.
In addition to the high-resolution classical Reynolds-averaged (RANS, unsteady RANS) and scale-resolved turbulence methods (LES, SBES, DES), coarse-grid methods are also used for real-time simulations. For small to medium model sizes we have powerful workstations at our disposal. In addition, the RWTH CLAIX Cluster is available to us for more extensive simulation tasks.