ME 470 Solidworks Flow Simulation

This Instructable is a tutorial for SOLIDWORKS 2016 flow simulation software. It shows the creation of a simulation of a pipe with two inlets for water and oxygen and an exit to the atmosphere. It goes through basic set up of the wizard, adding lids to your part, assigning goals for the CFD and viewing a few results.

The solidworks flow simulator add-in is opened from the add-in tab. Clicking on the button will add the flow simulator tab to the task bar.

The wizard for the flow simulation goes through setting up the project name and part configuration. You select a unit system or create a custom system. The two you're likely to use are the SI or Imperial(USA). You select analysis type and the physical features that apply to your scenario. Then you select all fluids that are apart of the study. You can set wall conditions involving temperature and roughness. Finally, you set initial conditions if you know any. The initial conditions can help speed up calculation time.

Add lids to your model to make it 'water tight'. The lids are where we will apply the boundry conditions for the simulation.

The goals we add tell the computer when to stop computing and give us an answer. CFD will continue to run iterations of the problem until told otherwise. We provide convergence conditions for the computer to judge the accuracy of its answers. Once the answers are within a thresh hold it stops computing

The simulation runs and solidworks provides details pertaining to the calculations, such as computational time and the number of iterations.

Solidworks has a many ways to view the results of the simulation. Pick any method, right click to insert an new visual, define the parameters and boom. Solidworks can create any or all of the result options from one simulation. Good Luck!

In this video I walk through all the above steps.