Gamma Meccanica conducted a CFD simulation on a 7 ton/h
electric melter (see Fig. 2a).
The actual geometry was imported via a STEP in SPACECLAIM.
Reasonable simplifications were applied to reduce the mesh size.
The resulting geometry (Fig. 2b) was parameterized. Several
geometric parameters are the subject of these studies;
- The electrode diameter
- The electrode depth
- The distance between t
he electrode axes
The parameters were configured in ANSYS Workbench and a
complete tetrahedral mesh of about 3.9M, which is well-suited to
a parametric geometry, was created. The mesh was converted into
a polymesh (of 0.8M) in ANSYS Fluent. Only one fluid domain,
called the melt domain, was used (see Fig. 3). The Air domain was
considered as a solid with the thermal properties of air.
A single Fluent case is able to include the electrical physics, the
thermal physics and the melt fluid dynamics, if an appropriate
configuration, as described in the following paragraph, is used.
Fig. 2 - Left - Rendering of the electric melter. Right - Simplified 3D geometry in SpaceClaim
Fig. 3 - Mesh created in ANSYS Workbench