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Let's say I've got some complex conditions such as these but haven't studied that phenomena yet:
- High Mach Number Flow
- Fluid Mixing
- Rotation or Movement
- Cavitation
In this study, I want to create a fan and a heat source. If you go to your input data, you don't see those in the tree. Right click at the top level, Customize Tree. This allows you to turn on additional complex values, such as heat sources and fans.
And so now with heat sources available, I'll say insert a volume source, I'm going to put 100 watts on that transformer, we'll call it good. As far as the fan is concerned, I can come in here and drop a dumb body, a dumb solid if I want, or I can even identify some of these as fans. And in fact fans can really be defined anywhere.
So in other words, if you want like an external inlet fan, I could click this face and you and I both know the air cannot get to that magically, but flow doesn't care. It's just going to bring air in from here. So fans internal fans, you need two faces. So I can even say fan gets sucked in here and then it gets magically blown out this face.
Is that actually how that works? No, but fans are actually pretty cool because they allow you to, oh, that's an internal fan. They allow you to basically just make stuff up as you go. Alright, I'm gonna leave the fan off for now, and we're gonna go ahead and get this ready to solve. The assumptions that are going on, when you use a fan, when you use a heat source, when you use any of these other values, two resistor components, heat pipes electrical sources, transfer boundary conditions, there's a lot of stuff in here that's pretty complicated.
And there's a lot of scenarios in the world that are complicated, such as multi phase flow, or particle studies, or mixing of fluids of relatively different viscosities, or extremely high or low pressures or velocities. And if you have something weird, whatever it is, I want you to know about these PDF documents that are on your hard drive when you install Flow.
There's three of them. The technical reference, tutorials, and validation examples. So if you have Flow, especially if you're a student, you have Flow, you're trying to get, figure out how to use it, and you just have no reference maybe you're trying to do a rotating geometry example go into the tutorials.
There's a example in there with rotating geometry. It shows you how to set it up. They give you the model, everything you need, explains it along the way. It's great. It's the next best thing to training. The validation examples is more like just basic simple examples that have known solutions that are then solved in each service pack and each release of the software to make sure it's accurate.
You can actually do your own checks. Saying, is this solving correctly? Is this giving correct answers? You can open up the models and check for yourself. But the big one is the technical reference. It explains the assumption, it explains the formula, it explains the coefficients. And it tells you what is and is not available.
If it's, for example, cavitation, it explains what goals to set in order to be sensitive to the existence of cavitation to make sure that the solver does not terminate prior to fully developed cavitation effects. There's just so much there, I can't possibly cover it all. But if you ever want to know, hey, I wonder if flow can do that, that's probably where you want to go first to find that out.
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