To prevent car bodies from corroding, a wax-like fluid is injected into approximately 100 chassis holes allowing the wax to cover cavities inside the car body. The wax is mixed with compressed air within a mixing chamber under a pressure of 80-100 bar. The resulting mixture is applied into the cavities via hole-, slot- or X-type outlets under a pressure of five or six bar. To predict the cavity's wax coverage in the very early stages of the vehicle development process, and to optimize the cavity waxing process itself, the waxing procedure is simulated using FLUENT. Cavity waxing is a crucial step for European car manufacturers to drastically improve corrosion protection and reduce warranty costs. The need of simulating the waxing process mainly arises because of the increasing reduction of prototype hardware. By employing FLUENT's Discrete Phase Model (DPM), extended by the functionality to model wax flow along cavity walls, good results have been achieved. An approach for coordinate-based inlets should lead to an improvement in modelling time due to since the modelling of the nozzles is no longer necessary. Also, for the subsequent optimization steps, a purely coordinate-based approach offers significant advantages in terms of easier nozzle geometry changes. Work has started for an easy-to-use Graphical User Interface (GUI) with a database in the background, therefore easy access to material properties for the different wax materials will be granted. To reduce calculation time, FLUENT will be run on a cluster of processors. All these measurements support the goal to provide an easy to operate software tool which provides visualizations of several spray pictures with different nozzle designs over night. The engineer can then choose the one which meets the requirements in terms of wax coverage by simultaneously optimized consumption of wax material.
Modeling of the General Motors Europe cavity waxing process
Modellierung des Hohlraumparaffinierverfahrens von General Motors Europa
2007
10 Seiten, 11 Bilder
Conference paper
English
Modeling of the General Motors Europe Cavity Waxing Process
British Library Conference Proceedings | 2007
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