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FLOW OPTIMIZATION OF VENTILATION DESIGN

The world-leading ventilation manufacturer, Soler & Palau, has used CORTIME with SolidWorks Flow Simulation to optimize the aerodynamic performance of a ventilation design

Soler & Palau have been looking for ways to improve their design process. That is why they turned to CORTIME. Read how they used CORTIME to improve the airflow in one of their ventilation designs – smarter and faster.

Soler & Palau Ventilation Group is one of the world’s leading manufacturers and suppliers of ventilation equipment, with their products and services being available in more than 90 countries. They pride themselves of being able to service “the smallest bathroom to the largest buildings on the face of the earth.” Supplying ventilation equipment in such broad settings of course puts high demands on their R&D department. In their own words:

“As we believe research and development to be a key source of competitive advantage, S&P has developed a product line with more than 10,000 models to meet all the needs of the market.”

– Soler & Palau

With such a wide product range it is paramount to constantly look for ways to improve the design process. That’s just what Soler & Palau’s R&D department in Florida were doing, when they found CORTIME. They were looking to re-design part of their product line and looked to save development time and enhance product performance by applying design exploration and data analysis tools in the design process.

Airflow Optimization of Ventilation System

Finding a way to obtain maximum airflow in a ventilation system can be an intricate process. When you have a large number of configurations you want to test, it gets especially labor intensive to set up every configuration. Even then, you can only test so many configurations without much indication of whether or not the optimal design is still out there.

Instead of going through that process, Soler & Palau applied CORTIME to one of their designs. They chose to focus on the radius and pitch of the blades on a propeller design.

The propeller design with the dimensions that will function as variables in the optimization.

Ranges are then applied to the variables in the CORTIME task pane to define the solution space. After running one flow simulation study in SolidWorks, CORTIME is then instructed to use the flow goals to maximize the flow inside the vent.

The CORTIME task pane is conveniantly integrated in the SolidWorks task pane with all the resources gathered in one interface.

When the optimization has finished, all the iterations tested by CORTIME are gathered in the analysis tool. The optimal design of the exploration is then easily identified by using the Parallel Coordinates Graph. This saves their engineers further manual development time, since none of the analysis needs to be performed manually.

The top image shows the Progress Graph, while the bottom image illustrates the Parallel Coordinates Graph.

Time Saved and Insight Gained

So, does it make sense to apply design exploration and data analysis in Soler & Palau’s design process? The easiest improvement to quantify is of course the manual modeling time saved. CORTIME resulted in a reduction of 3.6 man hours required for a simulation project with 9 configurations. For this type of project, Soler & Palau expects this to translate to approximately 130 hours in human effort saved yearly. However, Senior Design Developer, Nick Thiessen, sees CORTIME as much more than a time-saver. He foresees using CORTIME as an integrated part of new designs and re-designs resulting in Soler & Palau creating better designs faster:

“CORTIME gives me new insight into my design that would be impossible to obtain manually. I will be able to make early decisions about my designs which will have a significant effect on performance, cost and time to market.”

– Nick Thiessen, Senior Design Engineer
Soler & Palau, Florida

So, on the bottom line, CORTIME will help save R&D costs, increase product performance and serve customer needs faster. If you want to see if CORTIME can do the same for your R&D department, book a meeting with our Optimization Engineer, Omar, or download a free CORTIME trial.