Webinar: How Meritor Uses Particle CFD Methods to Understand Oil Flow in Gearboxes
Why Companies are Turning to Particleworks
There are many fluid dynamics problems which have traditionally been prohibitively expensive, both in man hours and compute time, to approach with CFD. As the demand for simulation driven design increases companies are turning to specialized solvers to tackle these kinds of problems.
What Meritor Said on the Webinar:
- “Before we used Particleworks, we used a traditional method that used finite volume. We had difficulty creating the mesh and defining the moving boundaries.”
- “With Particleworks we were able to increase our productivity by ten times”
- “We had one day of training and that was good”
- ‘With a traditional CFD solver we had to offset the gears so we wouldn’t have squeeze. With Particleworks we didn’t have to do any of that”
- “We run more what if analysis that we were not able to do before with a traditional CFD solver.”
- “We are definitely reducing physical tests. We still do physical tests. We have axle housings that are made of transparent plastic, so we can see the flow. But, we have reduced the number of physical tests quite a bit using Particleworks software.”
- “We have compared the results from Particleworks to our conventional CFD, and qualitatively, the fluid flow looks the same. Also, we can qualify the flow rates across some cross sections and they look the same. In addition, our European colleagues have done a test correlation with Particleworks by measuring flow rates, and results were in the same ballpark.”
Watch the full webinar:
One method in particular, Moving Particle Simulation (MPS), has seen great success in evaluating oil splashing in gearboxes. By eliminating large portions of the pre-processing stage and taking advtantage of the power of GPUs for computation, Particleworks allows engineers to better understand the performance of their products before a single prototype is made.
Who is Meritor?
Meritor is a global leader in axle, brake and suspension components for on and off-highway equipment. They are committed to creating products that offer superior performance, efficiency, and reliability which requires a deep understanding of how those products will behave in real world conditions. MPS offers them a window which can be difficult or impossible to achieve with physical testing alone and we are excited to share how Particleworks has impacted their design workflow.
What are Particle Methods for CFD?
First, particle methods for CFD are for the study of fluids, not the study of particles like sand. Particle methods study the flow of fluid using points in space 'particles' as the calculation points.
Particles can be viewed as objects carrying a physical property of the flow that is being simulated through the solution of Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE) that determine the trajectories and the evolution of the properties carried by the particles.