Simulating a Tire on Wet Ground with CONVERGE
When a car is driving on a wet road, the water between the tires and the ground can cause the car to lose traction, a phenomenon known as aquaplaning or hydroplaning. Aquaplaning can send the car off course and, in some cases, cause a serious accident. To prevent aquaplaning, tires must be capable of quickly dispersing water underneath them. We leveraged CONVERGE’s volume of fluid (VOF) modeling and autonomous meshing to simulate the dispersion of water from a tire rolling on wet ground. The first view shows an isosurface representing the surface of the water as it is dispersed. In the second view, the isosurface transitions to contours showing velocity magnitude. The last views show the mesh during the simulation. We used CONVERGE’s mesh embedding and Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) to help resolve the liquid-gas interface. In addition, we implemented proximity AMR to locally refine the mesh in the small gaps between the tire and the ground, while keeping the overall computational cost of the simulation reasonable. With CONVERGE’s automated cut-cell meshing technique, the solver easily handles complex moving boundaries and user meshing time is all but eliminated.
Convergent Science's CONVERGE is an innovative computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software that eliminates the grid generation bottleneck from the simulation process through autonomous meshing.