Simulation for a cooling system 1

[daviddor]

Hii everyone ,
In previous posts i discussed about a cooling system using a co2 gas . Mixing the gas with the air coming from a tank and then back to the tank(i am adding a sketch )

The tank is going to store boxes of fruits , and the process is part of a post harvest routine.
I would like to preform a flow and heat transfer simulation checking different kind of configurations , but never did those things before.
My general idea is to create the model on Solidworks and run on Simscale.
Since it's a small company for now and we are just at the beginning the budget is not very high I saw on solidworks website that that i can get 1 year free for entrepreneurs and simscale seems to me affordable in general even though i don't understand yet what does it mean "core hour" in their price .
Besides that, combining those two , will it be enough to define everything i need for this simulation? (flow of Co2, fruits data and so..)

Any thought or advises are welcome , thank you very much

 

[1503-44]

Can't you just find a refrigerator truck or something?

--Einstein gave the same test to students every year. When asked why he would do something like that, "Because the answers had changed."

 

[daviddor]

It's a startup company developing cooling system based on CO2 . It's an instant intense cooling for 2 hours maximum

 

[daviddor]

Didn't put it on SOLIDWORKS yet. I don't think it's gonna be the issue. I'm trying to choose cfd software though.

 

[ClydeMule]

I had good luck with SimScale. The value is in their engineering assistance. With the paid subscription they will basically hold your hand through the beginning of the project, and as you get better at it they will log in and look at your model if you get stuck on something.

You can fiddle fart around with the free part of simscale, but the types of modeling is limited and you have to make the project public.

The core hour pricing; when you run a simulation you can pick how many cores you want to use to process the solution. If it takes a given amount of processing power (core-hours) you can use less cores, and have it take longer, or use more cores and have it be faster. BUT, it is isn't simple algebra. As they explained to me, more cores is faster but less efficient. You have have 1 core work for 20 hours. 20 core hours. But 20 cores might take 1.5 hours. So 30 core hours, but you got it done in way less time.

When you run a solution, you have the option choose how many cores, but they default to the most efficient choice for you.

I love Solidworks, but for real CFD I would 100% go with SimScale over Solidworks. To be fair, I did not attempt the same projects I did in SimScale with Solidworks simulation.

The work I did had to do mostly with air flow temperature and flow distribution in data centers, air flow through generator radiators to evaluate pressure drop, and flow of refrigeration system condenser exhaust.