[dominatinMC]

Apologies in advance if I am posting in the wrong forum, but I've searched the website and have not found an answer to my query.


Basically, I am attempting to perform some simulations of water flowing in a large cylindrical tank, with the flow being turbulent. There appears to be two turbulent models in SolidWorks - these being the I-L and k-e model. From what I have read online, the k-e model is recommended in a lot of cases, so I am going to use that. However, do I need to calculate specific values of k and e for my case, or do I just accept the default values SolidWorks has?


Thanks in advance.

[LuckyTran]

Usually, people guestimate these from turbulence intensity and length scale. In many many problems, the crucial part of the simulation is rather insensitive to these settings (if your inlet boundary is far enough upstream for example) as long as you guess reasonable ballpark values.

If it really matters, you can do a follow up sensitivity study. If it really really matters then you will run precursor simulations to actually get profiles for k and epsilon.


Don't use the defaults, especially if the default value for k and epsilon are 1, because their typical values are usually not 1.

[dominatinMC]

Thanks very much for the quick reply, appreciate it.


It was my understanding that the k and epsilon values which are specified in the simulation set-up are very important to obtaining accurate/realistic results. I base this assumption on my reading of a number of journal papers, where the various authors usually specify their values of k and epsilon - without actually demonstrating how they were calculated. Because they are so frequently mentioned, I assumed they were important parameters.

[rudyy]

What is the I-L model? I only knew SolidWorks runs on the k-ε turbulence settings.

[LuckyTran]

Inviscid-Laminar. It is indeed not a turbulence model.

[rudyy]

Gotchya, thanks!