Product category:
Fluid, thermal, noise and vibration analysis software
News Release from: Flomerics | Subject: Flovent
Edited by the Engineeringtalk Editorial
Team on 18 November 2004
Simulation helps paint booth go with the
flow
Engineers at Technicon Engineering and Flomerics have worked together to solve a challenging airflow problem in a paint booth at Robins Air Force Base, Warner-Robins, Georgia.
Engineers at Technicon Engineering and Flomerics have worked together to solve a challenging airflow problem in a paint booth at Robins Air Force Base, Warner-Robins, Georgia The air is supposed to flow smoothly across the paint booth in order to move the fumes out of the painters' faces
Instead, the air swirled around the room.
Flomerics used Flovent computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software to analyse the airflow conditions in the air supply ductwork and plenum and paint booth.
The models showed that the relationship of the holes in the ducts in the plenum that supplies the paint booth to the duct's wall thickness needed to be carefully controlled in order to get the air to turn 90 degrees so it could be delivered evenly across the length of the plenum.
"Without computer simulation, it could have taken months of very expensive experiments to understand what was causing the turbulence", said Clint Hardie, Principal with Technicon Engineering.
"With the simulation results in hand, we were quickly able to specify a duct material that solved the problem".
The paint booth is primarily used on large ground support equipment.
Technicon engineers were quickly able to determine that the problem was that air was entering the plenum at too high a velocity to approach uniform distribution of air out of the supply grills.
They set a goal of approaching an even cross-sectional velocity of 65ft/min across the paint bay.
Experiments showed that the delivered flow rate of 58,000ft3/min, which is roughly a one-quarter of the total flow, produced a duct velocity of roughly 567ft/min, far too high to achieve uniform distribution in the paint booth.
Technicon made the decision to use the services of Flomerics to create a CFD model of the airflow through the plenum and paint booth.
CFD graphically calculates and displays flow velocity and direction, pressure and temperature throughout the computational domain, which helps engineers understand the root cause of flow problems and what is needed to fix them.
CFD also provides the ability to model a variety of options on the computer so that the most economical solutions can be pursued with a high degree of confidence in their validity.
Flomerics engineers modeled the ductwork with small holes of 0.25 to 0.5in diameter with Flovent software in an effort to deliver the air evenly across the length of the plenum.
Flovent's automatic sequential optimisation capability adjusts the values of all design variables intelligently to optimise the value of a design aim specified by the user.
The models showed that in order to get the air to turn 90 degrees, the relationship of hole size to wall thickness needed to be 4:1 or greater.
Technicon engineers found a material that met these requirements, Microbe-X LT fabric from Ductsox.
The fabric contains hundreds of thousands of holes and the relationship of hole size to wall thickness ranges from 10e-12 to 1.
Flomerics modeled this material and discovered that it delivered the required performance.
In addition, exit velocities from the fabric approach 50ft/min, lowering the effect of stray eddy currents. Request a free brochure from Flomerics ...
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