Grad Student Validating Simulations

In a paper published in the Proceedings of FEDSM’09 (the 2009 ASME Fluids Engineering Division summer Meeting, held August 2 through 6, 2009, in Vail, Colorado), Dr. Ivana Milanovic, associate professor and chair of Mechanical Engineering in CETA, reported on her work on impinging jets. Such a jet is simply fluid issuing from a nozzle that hits a wall perpendicularly and splits. Water pouring from a faucet into a sink is an impinging jet. The study of such jets is important because they have applications in vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft, cooling and heating, drying, mixing, and chemical vapor deposition (CVD) processes. Hence Dr. Milanovic’s continued attention to the subject.

However, experimenting on impinging jets can be expensive. In one experiment, which examined flow structure in the near wall region of a submerged impinging jet using a non-intrusive flow diagnostic technique that involved a laser, the setup cost over $200,000. Dr. Milanovic has therefore turned her attention to computer simulation of such experiments.

Dr. Milanovic’s graduate student, Ajal Parikh, has created a simulation of the experiment and is working to match the simulation’s data to the experimental data; that is to say, she is using ANSYS, Fluent, and Tecplot in an attempt to validate the simulation she has created. If she can do so, experimenters can have confidence in the simulation and use it for other experiments.

Ajal Parikh working on simulating impinging jets

Ms. Parikh, who began her graduate work in Mechanical Engineering in 2008, is performing this work as her Master’s thesis research project and also is interning at Westinghouse, where she works in the Loss of Coolant Accident Analysis & Methods (LA&M) Group. Along with other members of that group, she is responsible for providing high-quality, cost-effective, and innovative solutions to the nuclear power industry. The principal product of the group is systems & safety analysis integrated into the design of the customer utility. More specifically, Ms. Parikh analyses, summarizes and prepares date required for emergency core cooling systems, which must met NRC design criteria.

Her goal here in CETA is to create confidence in CFD (computational fluid dynamics) predictions Once she can demonstrate that the data is indeed valid, other students can use the software to run experiments that are now not possible because of cost and space considerations.

Ms. Parikh reports that “the work is a great learning experience. . . . I am learning different software that can save us on experimental hurdles and still predict the actual results, which is a great help for industry.” The work will be of great use here in CETA, too, where students will be able to perform more experimental studies and learn software that is crucial in industry.