SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation Transient Animations
SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation has an incredibly powerful toolset for visualizing results. While plots such as flow trajectories can be animated with a simple right click (How To: Flow Trajectories), what about those awesome animations using all result types changing over time?
Now, if you haven’t already checked out our overview of flow simulation results you can here: SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation: Results Visualization, but what we would like to show you is specific to transient analysis types and animations of fluids changing over time. To do this, let’s take a look at the example of a cylinder in cross-flow near transitional turbulence where there is some vortex shedding.
Using the Flow Simulation Wizard (which we recommend setting up for EVERY Flow Simulation project) and specifying that the simulation is time-dependent and should last for 80 seconds.
After finishing the wizard (in this example we specified water and calculated a velocity that should give a Reynold’s number of 140), there are only a few more things to set up in the Flow Simulation tree. We’ve chosen to run a 2D computational domain for the sake of solve time, and we’ve added a global goal to monitor force on our cylinder and an equation goal to calculate a drag coefficient.
To further define the transient settings you need to access the Calculation Control Options which can be accessed from a right click of the Input Data folder.
These controls allow you to adjust total physical time and finishing conditions for the solver. You can also enable adaptive solution refinement in the mesh to further boost accuracy in results.
It’s important to leave the solving tab settings on default, but don’t forget you should also review the Saving tab. These settings can affect how much space the animation takes on your hard drive, so save it at an interval that will give you a reasonable frame rate for your animations.
In this example, we’ve chosen to save full results every .32 seconds. For a 10 second animation, this should give me a smooth framerate of about 25 frames per second.
Once results are in, it’s time to create a few plots to animate. Again, if you haven’t watched our overview of Flow Simulation Results, now’s the time. You can animate any result plot you create!
We have decided to animate a simple cut plot of velocity using contours and streamlines.
Once created, inserting an animation is made easy with another friendly wizard.
Simply choose the total animation time you want, and that we are looking for a ‘Scenario’ in order to animate development of a flow field distribution in time.
Finally, we insert a control point for the Cut Plot by right-clicking on the timeline adjacent to the cut plot at 0 seconds and ending at the 10-second mark.
Once the recording is complete, you can play it back inside of SOLIDWORKS, or navigate to the results folder to find the whole AVI file. Follow these steps, and you too can make impressive transient animations such as these. You can check out similar videos on our YouTube channel.
About the author
A SOLIDWORKS user since 2005, Philip Morrow has developed his skills through his work as a student and machinist at the University of Texas, a mechanical engineer in Austin Texas, and an applications expert at MLC CAD Systems. With a specialty in simulation, Philip supports, teaches and designs with all things SOLIDWORKS.
