I recently was modeling flow though a pipe, I had modeled the inlet with mass flow inlet boundary condition. Is there some other way of applying the same boundary condition, may be by using a spherical control volume outside the inlet.

anshul

I'm not entirely sure what you're shooting for, but if you're trying to get flow characteristics due to the inlet, a common way of dealing with this is to create a large area in front of the inlet (a plenum) and apply the boundary condition on the other side of the plenum. This also pulls the boundary condition away from your area of interest.

Try to model it as real as possible. You may want to switch to a pressure inlet to prevent the velocity from entering the plenum where it normally wouldn't.

Hope this helps, and goodluck, Jason

Thanx Jason,

As I had told earlier, I am solving a problem in an air intake, the air comes at some specified mass flow rate and exits the domain through a series of outlet ports. So I wanted to know about the different ways to provide the inlet mass flow boundary conditions. One of my colleagues suggested using a sphere of about 3 times the inlet radius, outside the inlet face. Also is such care is required at the outlet also. I would be very grateful to you if you could tell me abt some references where I can read about proper modeling of internal flows.

thanx once again

Anshul