Create Area

In the geometry step, we give it a key input for the mathematical model, i.e., the domain over which we
Want to solve the governing equations.

1. To create the rectangle from the sketch,

go to concept,
surfaces from sketches.
Click anywhere on the sketch, and click Apply in Details View.
So now the tool knows that it needs to create the area from the sketch.

And you might have surface SK1, for instance.

2. Click generate.
And they'll generate the area.

And I can turn off the sketch. By clicking on

And that'll show me just the area.

And this is what is sent forth to the mesher and the solver.
And that appears under one part one body.

3. And since that's a flow domain, we will

click that that's not a solid domain,
that's a fluid domain by first clicking on surface body.

So like that.
4. And the thickness doesn't enter anywhere in our mathematical model, because we have an
axisymmetric mathematical model.

So we can ignore that setting.

We have now defined the domain over which we want to solve our governing equations.
5. And we are going to put boundary conditions at the edges of that domain.

Create Mesh
the meshing step, we are actually affecting the numerical solution procedure-- how that mathematical
model is going to be solved. The meshing step doesn't affect the mathematical model.
1. To start the mesher, double-click on Mesh.
After a little bit, the meshing tool comes up.
2. Let's try what the default mesh looks like.
highlight Mesh in the tree and click Update.
that gives me a coarse mesh.
It's just one division along the radial direction.
Too coarse of a mesh, so I want to put in more cells.
I can control that by putting in what I call sizing.
3. So I go to Mesh Control,
Click Sizing,
and let's select the edge selection filter,

select left edge, hold down the Control key, and select right edge, Click Apply in details
of edge sizing-sizing.
And then I can set the number of divisions I want along those edges,
so I'll go Under Type I'll click Number of Divisions instead of element , and let's go with
10.

Similarly, let's put in a sizing for top and bottom edges.

So I'll click Mesh Control, Sizing, and select top edge, And drag the cursor, I can select
bottom edge to That's called pane select.
Apply.

And I'll set the number of divisions to be 100,

and then update the mesh.
If I highlight Mesh in the tree, I can see it.

And if I zoom in here, I see that I get some triangles and so on. This is simple geometry.

I just want to have a nice regular mesh called a structured mesh.

4. And to get a uniform or a structured mesh-- and this will work only for simple geometries- click Mesh Control, Face Meshing. This used to be called Map Face Meshing in previous versions.
select the rectangle and click Apply,

And click Update.

highlight Mesh in the tree

you can see that you have a nice regular mesh so you can actually store the information in this mesh in
a two-dimensional area because there's a nice structure in the axial direction and the radial direction.
We see that it's modified, it's not giving me uniform spacing over here,
so what it did was it used the inputs I gave it as guidance.
5. Let's tell it don't mess with inputs. Use it as hard setting.
So I can go into Edge Sizing and set Behavior to Hard.

And I'll click Behavior, Hard.

This is telling the mesher that, hey, this is a hard setting.
It's not a soft setting.

You want to do this only for simple geometries. For complex geometries, you want to leave it at soft.
You just want to give some guidance on how to mesh it or what kind of element size you want.

And let's see the effect of that.

Highlight Mesh, and now you see I get these uniform divisions.
And if I look in the radial direction, I'll have 10 uniform divisions in the radial direction.

So you can see the effect of the Hard setting.

The bullseye that you see is showing me the sizings that are actually under here, that's called the
Advanced Size Function. This is very useful for complex geometries and the defaults are set for complex
geometries.
I like to turn it off for simple geometries.

So if I just turn it off, and then I update the mesh,

I see the bulls eye goes away.
And I have a nice regular mesh with 100 divisions in the axial direction and 10 divisions in the radial
direction.
Let's save the project.

Effect on Numerical Solution Procedure

Let's think about how we have affected the numerical solution procedure by creating this mesh.

If I highlight Mesh in the tree and

go under Statistics and expand the statistics, it clicks the number of elements is thousand and
the mesher is using finite element terminology.
In finite volume, we call these cells. So we have thousand cells.
So we've divided the domain into thousand cells.
And the nodes are the corners-- these corners, for instance.
So let's see how that affects the numerical solution procedure.

the solver is going to calculate the velocity and pressure at the centers

of each of these thousand cells.

So you have thousand cell centers, and at each cell center, it's going to calculate two components of
velocity and one component of pressure, so three variables.
So into 3. And that'll give me 3,000 unknown values. So what we have told the solver is find 3,000
unknown values of velocity and pressure, and we have marked out the locations at which these selected
variables need to be calculated.

The solver will have to solve a system of 3,000 algebraic equations, most of which are nonlinear.
And in writing the algebraic equation for mass conservation for this cell, for instance, as we saw, it will
relate the velocity at this cell center to the velocity at this cell center and the velocity at this cell center.
So we can see how we have given it some key information about the numerical solution procedure
when we have provided the mesh

Label Boundaries

in the Fluent solver, you cannot click on a boundary and give the associated boundary condition.
What you have to do is you have to label the boundary in the mesher, and then in the Fluent solver, you
have to use that label to give the boundary condition.
So let's label the boundaries.
1.
2.

Select Zoom to fit.

Highlight Geometry in the tree.
And first let's label the inlet.
Select the Edge Selection filter.
Select the inlet, left click, and then right click and click Create Named Selection. And I will call it
inlet.

And if I go in Names Selections oin tree outline, I see that that name selection appears.
And if I highlight it, it shows me what the corresponding boundary is.
3. Similarly, give a name selection for the outlet.
4. This I will call pipe wall-- pipe_wall.
5. And this I will call centerline.
And I can Control click on all the Named Selections
to see what each label-- what boundary it corresponds to.

6. It's also a good idea to give a label for the flow domain.
This is not necessary, but it's a good idea.
To do that, highlight the Face Selection filter

and select the area corresponding to the flow domain, right click.
I'll get to Create Named Selection option.
And I'll call this flow_domain.

So I have my Named Selections and I can use these

to give boundary conditions later on.
you have to go back to the project page, right click on Mesh, and click Update.
And then you'll get the tick mark.

And then save the project.

Model Setup
Start-Up
Defining the governing equations and boundary conditions.
1. Go to the project page and double click on setup to bring up the fluent solver.
And in the fluent launcher, I will select double precision.
This will use 64 bits for each floating point number.
So you're going to get increased precision for each number.
In this particular case, it's not going to really affect the solution.
I've seen it affect, you know, the residuals that are reported.
The trade off is that you get increased precision,
but you're also going to use more memory and you might also
take a performance hit.
But in this case, that's not an issue.

So select double precision and click OK.

That brings the interface to the fluent solver.

2. And let's check the mesh.

OK, it didn't complain, so that's good.

a) Let's go under scale, and we see that the horizontal accent is from 0 to 3 and the
vertical accent is from 0 to 0.1.

And this is good to check, particular with axisymmetric problems.

I've seen students get into trouble because their y was slightly negative,
and for axisymmetric metric problems the solver
is assuming that your whole domain is on or over the x-axis.
b) Click on display and you see this is how you can display the mesh.
I'll deselect all the surfaces and then select them in turn.
So if I just select inlet and click display, I see the inlet and I can zoom in.
If I select this, I can kind of zoom in there.

And if I click outlet-- I might have to zoom out here.

OK, so I see the outlet, the center line, and so on.
And then the interior flow domain gives me all the interior cells.

So just let me select all the surfaces display.

Define Governing Equations

Let's define the governing equations that we want to solve.
1. Highlight General.
This setting, Pressure-Based versus Density-Based affects not the mathematical model,
but how the mathematical model is solved. And we'll leave that as default.
We want to solve the steady version of the conservation equation. So that's a default.

This doesn't affect this particular problem.

And by default, you can see that the 2D space, same version of the conservation equations,
are turned on.

That is we want to solve the conservation equations and the cylindrical coordinates. And
so, click on axis symmetric.
And that's a big change in the mathematical model.
This is one click. It's a big change in the mathematical model.
clicked on axis symmetric, it switched--

want to solve the cylindrical coordinate version of the conservation equation.

And effectively, the equations that it's going to solve
Are

It's a big change in the governing equations.

2. And if I expand this, under models, energy is turned off.
And we saw that for incompressible flow, we don't need to turn on the energy equation.
We have the laminar version of the conservation equation,
So nothing to do under models.
And the only thing remaining is to define the constants in the governing
equations, row and Meu.
And that you do under Materials.
3. So I'll expand Materials,
highlight Fluid, right click, and click New.
And I can give it an appropriate name.
I'll call it go-big-red.
And the density, we set to 1.
And the coefficient of the viscosity, we set to 2 e to the power of minus 3.


And that'll give us the Reynolds number 100 that we want.

And I'll click, yes here.

Please confirm property values. And we'll do that.

4. So that you do, by going to the Cell Zone Conditions.

I'm going to the Flow Domain, and double-clicking on it.

And you see that the material being used is air and not go-big-red.
So once I change that, now the, you know, the values of row and meu being used in the flow
domain are the ones we want.
That completes the definition of the governing equations.

How to return mesh to original view

if your mesh gets askew and so on, I can go in here.
click Display, Views,

and just pick Default. Or I can click Front view and click Apply and
Close.

Absolute and Gauge Pressures

When we define the boundary conditions on the pressure, we'll be working in terms of a gauge pressure
rather than an absolute pressure.
So we need to understand what's the difference between gauge and absolute pressures.
Let's do that.
If I look at this graphic here,

this represents absolute

0 pressure.
That's perfect vacuum

The absolute pressure is the pressure measured with respect to absolute 0 or perfect
vacuum.
And that can be a big number. For atmospheric pressure it's of the order of 10 to the power of 5
in Pascals, and that's a big number.
Why is that a problem?
To understand that let me go back to my mesh.
So let's say the solver is doing conservation of momentum in the x direction, so one of the
contributing terms is the pressure on that particular control volume.
And to calculate the pressure in the axial direction
it would need the pressure on Left and the pressure on right faces.
So let's say that pressure force is pressure on the right face times an area,
and the pressure force on this face is pressure on the left face times an area.

 Now, in this kind of a flow you're going to get very little variations in the absolute pressure
across the cell.
as you refine the mesh those variations are going to be even smaller, which means you're going
to get small differences of large numbers.
And that leads to round off errors because of the finite precision
of the computer.
So how do we get around this problem of having
small differences of large numbers?
It's done by working in terms of a gauge pressure.
So you split the absolute pressure into a reference pressure plus a gauge pressure.
And the reference pressure is picked by the user.
So if you pick the reference pressure to be an appropriate value, the gauge pressure is going to
basically check variations from that reference.
As an analogy, let's say on the left face the pressure force is 2,000.02 in whatever the units.
And if your computer has only a precision of four digits
that's going to be rounded off to 2000.
And on the right face let's say it's 2,000.01.
So when it takes a difference, if you have precision of only four digits-the left face the pressure force is going to be 2,000, the right face the pressure force
this is going to be 2,000-- it's going to say, hey, there's no pressure differential.
Whereas that small number matters, i.e. .02 and .01
Whereas if I subtract out 2000, and take 2000 as my reference.

I'm going to get the difference between 0.02 and 0.01 at gauge pressure.
And that will fit within the precision of a four digits,
and I'm going to get the right result, As shown below.

2000

So you see how working in terms of the gauge pressure is advantageous.

And if I go back here, the place where you set the reference pressure is under Operating Conditions in
Boundary Conditions , and the default is 1 atmosphere.

So the operating pressure is basically that reference pressure.

Boundary Conditions
Go back to the boundary conditions from the pre-analysis.

1.

Let's with the inlet. And we need to specify the velocity at the inlet.
highlight boundary conditions.
Select inlet.
the type is set to velocity inlet.
So here the solver is guessing.
It's saying that, hey, you called this the inlet,
so probably the flow is going to come in here.
And there's an incompressible flow, so you probably
want to set the velocity here.
And so that's right.

a) So I'll say edit.

a) And for velocity specification method, pick components, that's not the default.
The axial velocity-- so because we have switched to axis symmetric,
the cylindrical coordinate.
b) Set the axial velocity is to 1.
c) And the radial velocity is 0.
d) This setting-- ignore supersonic. Everything's low speed here. In fact, incompressible.

e) So there's an initial gauge pressure.

That's an initial guess for the gauge pressure at the inlet.

So that's an initial guess over here.

And that'll get updated by the solver, it's not really a boundary condition here.
And we can set the gates pressure to 0,
f)

and check the operating pressure over here, and that's under operating conditions. And
that's 1 atmosphere.
Essentially we have set the absolute pressure
to be 1 atmosphere as the initial guess at the inlet.

2. Let's go to the outlet, and set the boundary condition there.

a. So pick outlet.
And here it says, hey, probably flow is going to go out of this boundary,
and you want to the pressure there.
That's a guess, that's right.
b. So say edit, And the gauge pressure by default is 0.
c. And the corresponding absolute pressure is 1 atmosphere.

3. Let's set the boundary condition here.

a. So I'll go to pipe wall.
And the type is set to wall, which is right.
b. if I go in here, edit, you see it's set to no slip.

Again, the default gives us that.

So I don't need to do anything.
I can say OK or Cancel.
4. And at the center line-- this is important.
a. You need to set the type to be axis.

b. And I was playing around with it.

OK.
And just say OK.
And one thing to keep in mind is that so for a axis symmetry problem,
your horizontal axis is always set to the axis boundary condition.

If you had a pipe that's oriented vertically,

when you put it into the solver, you have to make this the axis.
And I've seen students tripping up on that.
And we saw that that's because it makes the coding easier.
So you can have a simple switch to go between the Cartesian coordinates
and the cylindrical coordinates.
And that completes the definition of the boundary conditions.
So you can see it's a few tweaks, and we get the boundary conditions
that they want.

Mathematical Model Definition is Complete

At this point our mathematical model is completely defined.

So we have defined the governing equations, and

the domain over which the governing equations that need to be solved we
gave in the geometry step

So this was defined in the geometry step.

And we have also given boundary conditions at the edges of that domain.
So governing equations define a domain, boundary conditions
define the edges of the domain.
So if you define all of that, and that means our boundary value problem
is completely defined.
And our mathematical model is completely defined.

And let's move on to getting the solver to solve that numerically using
the finite volume method.