ACU-T: 6501 Flow Through Porous Medium with Physical Velocity
Prerequisites
This tutorial provides the instructions for setting up, solving, and viewing results for a simulation of a flow through porous medium that is specified using the physical velocity input method. Prior to starting this tutorial, you should have already run through the introductory tutorial, ACU-T: 1000 Basic Flow Set Up, and have a basic understanding of HyperWorks CFD and AcuSolve. To run this simulation, you will need access to a licensed version of HyperWorks CFD and AcuSolve.
Prior to running through this tutorial, copy HyperWorksCFD_tutorial_inputs.zip from <Altair_installation_directory>\hwcfdsolvers\acusolve\win64\model_files\tutorials\AcuSolve to a local directory. Extract ACU-T6501_PorousMediaPhysical.hm from HyperWorksCFD_tutorial_inputs.zip.
Problem Description
The problem to be addressed in this tutorial is shown schematically in the figure below. It consists of a cylindrical channel with a porous medium in the flow section. As the flow passes through this section, a pressure drop is observed. In this simulation, an inlet velocity will be assigned to the flow and pressure drop across the porous medium will be calculated. The length of the porous section is 0.06 m and the fluid is defined as air fluid with a density of 1.225 kg/m3 and a molecular viscosity of 1.781e-5 kg/m-s. The inlet velocity of the flow is 0.2 m/s.
![](../../../images/tutorials/acu/ACU-6501-Figure1.png)
Figure 1.
The porosity is defined as the ratio of the volume of fluid to the total volume. With the superficial velocity approach, the porosity is set to 1 and the flow velocity is calculated as if there is no obstruction to the flow. When using the porous medium with physical velocity, the porosity of the volume is considered when calculating the flow velocity. This allows for a more physical representation of the flow within these components. In this tutorial, we will use a porosity value of 0.5
Start HyperWorks CFD and Open the HyperMesh Database
Validate the Geometry
The Validate tool scans through the entire model, performs checks on the surfaces and solids, and flags any defects in the geometry, such as free edges, closed shells, intersections, duplicates, and slivers.
![](../../../images/icons/icon_validate_model_valid.png)
Figure 3.
Set Up Flow
Set Up the Simulation Parameters and Solver Settings
Assign Material Properties
Define the Porous Medium
Assign the Flow Boundary Conditions
Generate the Mesh
Run AcuSolve
Post-Process the Results
Summary
In this tutorial, you learned how to set up and solve a flow simulation with porous medium using the physical velocity formulation. This implementation allows you to specify values of porosity in the fluid to emulate the fluid packing within a porous media. You started by importing the HyperWorks CFD input database and then you defined the porous medium. Next, you assigned the flow boundary conditions and generated the mesh. Once the solution was computed, you created a plot of the pressure drop across the porous section using HyperWorks CFD.