Tips & Tricks

The manufacturing of sand cores

The manufacturing of iron, steel and non-ferrous castings is achieved using a variety of casting process designs, and most of these involve the use of sand cores which form the internal shape of the casting. A good quality casting requires a good quality core. Dimensional stability, uniform density, strength, hardness and permeability are some of the characteristics that need to be controlled. A good core must have suffi cient strength and hardness to be handled and to resist during the pouring of liquid metal. Suffi cient permeability is also necessary for the escape of gases generated during the casting process. The diff erent manufacturing processes and some of the issues related to core production will be discussed here.

FLEXlm protection file system

ESI group needs to license, manage and track a variety of licensing options, platform and product dependencies. FLEXlm is one of the only software that is up to this task. A simple, shrinkwrapped license management product would not be powerful and flexible enough to license all ESI products.

Why it is useful to describe problems in terms of non-dimensional parameters and which ones are the main important in solidification?

A dimensionless quantity is a quantity without any physical units. Such a number is typically defi ned as a product or ratio of quantities which do have units, in such a way that all units cancel. Dimensionless quantities are widely used in the fields of physics and engineering but also in every day life.

CFD-VIEW: Working with cell-center data in batch mode

Many improvements have been made in CFD-VIEW that allows the manipulation of cell-center data. The latest cell-center data additions implemented in CFD-VIEW V2011.0 include, for example, support for the MinMax Probe and the Calculator.

"Per Pixel Lighting" display option in CFD-VIEW

When visualizing CFD solutions, it is often of interest to see a particular range of variable values, and it is therefore useful to be able to clip the surface coloring to that range, as to obtain a clearer view of the areas affected by the variable.

Visualizing decomposed model without zonal interface outlines

Running a simulation in parallel allows quicker turn around for larger and complex problems. Such parallel jobs require the computational domain to be decomposed into multiple zones. Such a multiple-zone file may be inconvenient to post-process in CFD-VIEW because zonal interface outlines will be visible and the original surfaces would have been split. As depicted in figure 1 below, these outlines can be numerous and may therefore hinder the clarity of the model.

Visualizing particle size effect on Spray particle trajectory

When analyzing flow vectors, one can get a general trend of the direction of the flow and locations of recirculation. But what if you need to specifically know where a particle will end up? Maybe release points need to be studied. Then, the size and mass can make a difference in the path a particle travels.

Using Macros in CFD-VIEW

In some cases, you might have to perform the same task several times to post-process your results in CFD-VIEW. This can happen for example when you are running a parametric study and need to extract the same information from all the solution files. In this case, it might be time-saving to use the Macro option of CFD-VIEW, especially if obtaining the information necessitates many operations.

Using CFD-VIEW Scripting for transient simulations post-processing

With the Python scripting capabilities of CFD-VIEW, you can quickly and easily perform the repetitive tasks you encounter when post-processing transient simulations.

CFD-VIEW: Save Smaller mdl Files

While working with CFD-VIEW, the user has the option of saving an mdl file. This file stores all the entities created in CFD-VIEW, from the point the DTF file (or other data file) was imported, to their current state at the time of saving. The user can thus reopen this file anytime later to resume work.