Physics Based Washing Machine Simulations.

This thesis describes the development of a simulation of the interaction of cloth and water that takes place inside a washing machine. The simulation consists of four basic parts: a large deformation elastic thin plate model for the cloth based on Love (1944), a rectangular-Cartesian-mesh solver for the Navier-Stokes equations based on Brown et al. (2001), the Immersed Boundary method of Peskin (1972) for cloth/fluid interaction, and a domain-mapping technique for representing irregular domain boundaries on Cartesian grids. Although the lack of an accompanying experimental effort prevented its thorough validation, the final simulation was subjected to a variety of validation tests involving analytical solutions and experimental measurements in simple geometries. The implementation of the thin plate model combined with the Immersed Boundary method was able to match the natural frequencies of a vibrating plate within +/- 1%, and was able to predict large deformation beam shapes with similar accuracy. In addition, this validation effort suggests that the ratio between the Immersed Boundary method’s Lagrangian and Eulerian point-spacings should be approximately unity for better accuracy, when accounting for finite bending stiffness. Furthermore, it was found that the Immersed Boundary method formulation may provide better results with a narrow desingularization of the two-dimensional cloth onto the three-dimensional Cartesian mesh while sacrificing numerical stability. Complicated moving boundaries are handled by a domain-mapping technique that uses a Heaviside function to switch between solving the equations for the cloth/fluid mixture and specifying the velocity field for the washing machine’s solid boundaries. This boundary-condition formulation was benchmarked against well-known steady and unsteady flow fields: circular Couette flow, and a uniform flow past a cylinder. Using these individually verified basic components together, two and three-dimensional simulations of the washing machine processes are created. A selection of studies involving the effect of different numerical and physical parameters on the kinematics of cloth motion and the statistics of the cloth stresses in a vertical-axis washing machine are reported. In particular, the coarse grid simulations predicted a realistic and qualitatively correct pattern for the motion of the cloth pieces.Ph.D.Mechanical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57704/2/dakcabay_1.pd

Cavity induced vibration of flexible hydrofoils

The objective of this work is to investigate the influence of cavity-induced vibrations on the dynamic response and stability of a NACA66 hydrofoil at 8° angle of attack at Re=750 000 via combined experimental measurements and numerical simulations. The rectangular, cantilevered hydrofoil is assumed to be rigid in the chordwise direction, while the spanwise bending and twisting deformations are represented using a two-degrees-of-freedom structural model. The multiphase flow is modeled with an incompressible, unsteady Reynolds Averaged Navier–Stokes solver with the k–ω Shear Stress Transport (SST) turbulence closure model, while the phase evolutions are modeled with a mass-transport equation based cavitation model. The numerical predictions are compared with experimental measurements across a range of cavitation numbers for a rigid and a flexible hydrofoil with the same undeformed geometries. The results showed that foil flexibility can lead to: (1) focusing – locking – of the frequency content of the vibrations to the nearest sub-harmonics of the foil׳s wetted natural frequencies, and (2) broadening of the frequency content of the vibrations in the unstable cavitation regime, where amplifications are observed in the sub-harmonics of the foil natural frequencies. Cavitation was also observed to cause frequency modulation, as the fluid density, and hence fluid induced (inertial, damping, and disturbing) forces fluctuated with unsteady cavitation.The authors gratefully acknowledge Ms. Kelly Cooper (program manager) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR), for their financial support through Grant nos. N00014-11-1-0833 and N0014-12-C-0585, as well as ONR Global and Dr. Woei-Min Lin (program manager) through grant no. N62909-12-1-7076