Simulating Vehicle Water Wading with CONVERGE
It’s crucial for a car to maintain stability and functionality in a water wading scenario (i.e., being driven through shallow to deep water). However, performing physical wading tests is expensive both in terms of time and money, requiring costly iterative design changes if the car fails. CFD simulations can help detect problems related to water wading at an earlier point in the design process. Here, we used CONVERGE’s volume of fluid (VOF) modeling with a High Resolution Interface Capturing (HRIC) scheme to investigate how water spreads around a car as it moves through shallow water. The first view shows how the water splashes as the car moves. The colors transition to pressure contours at 0:06, and then to velocity contours at 0:11. The second view shows the mass fraction of the water on the car’s surface, illustrating how the water spreads over the car. In the last two views, you can see how CONVERGE’s autonomous meshing with cut-cell approach seamlessly handles the moving geometry and Adaptive Mesh Refinement helps capture the dynamics of the water throughout the simulation.
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.