ENGR 114
Final Project
Michael Borisenko
I decided to model a turbocharger as my final project. I always had an interest in turbos
it fulfilled the project requirements. During the modeling process I had to came across a few
challenges that required me to use modeling techniques we had not covered or talked about in
class.
Advanced Lofts:
Right off the bat I started with trying to model the turbine housing. I needed to create a
spiraling tube that converged. After many attempts with varying amounts of success I found a
way to do it.
Figure 1: Loft sketches
I sketched a circle then I inserted a spiral. Making sure both the spiral and the circle
were still visible I went through and sketched a total of four circles on the front and right
planes. I put a construction line through the center of the circles so that I was able to add
peirce relations from the edge of the circle to the inner circle and to the outer spiral. This way it
made for easy editing of the model down the road. The smallest and last circle I made by
sketching a line on the top plane, specifying the angle from the x-axis and surface extruded it
straight up. You can use a reference plane instead but that requires an additional 3d sketch. I
then used the surface as a sketch plane where I drew the last and fifth circle. After the
sketches were completed I was ready to loft it. In the loft feature you select all of the circles in
order, largest to smallest or smallest to largest, doesn’t matter which way you do it but it has to
be in order, than I selected the spiral and the inner circle as guide curves to the loft. It came
out beautifully. In the end it used 6 sketches and a spiral.
One error I kept having was that the guide curves didn’t intersect the sketches because
I tried making one guide circle through the center of the varying diameter circles. When you
sketch a circle it is not a closed surface thus the guide curves have to intersect or coincide with
the edges of the sketched circles.
Figure 2: completed loft
Creating the turbine and compressor wheels also took some ingenuity with the loft
command. I used 2 rectangles offset a height and angle and a 3d spline as a guide curve.
Turbine loft sketches
Another difficulty I ran into was that I wanted the inside cut to slim down and get thinner
with the pipe. Therefore I used a similar technique as with the circular lofted tube but this time I
used rectangles along with the outer spiral and inner circle and I lofted cut.
Figure 4: section view showing lofted cut
Before I found the lofted cut command, on the turbine housing I surface lofted the
rectangular spiral instead of lofted cut. Then I thickened cut with the surface to achieve the
same result. However the thicken cut left the start and end edges uncut so I had to sketch
rectangles and extrude cut the edges. I learned that if you cut the separate solid bodies with a
cut, a dialog box pops up asking which body you would like to keep.
Figure 5: thicken cut
Flow Simulation:
I wanted to do a flow simulation of the compressor assembly (compressor housing and
the compressor itself). However in FlowXpress you do not have the option to have rotation. I
wanted to model it with the compressor spinning at 100,000 RPM (typical for gasoline engine
turbochargers). Therefore I used the full Flow Simulation package which has much more
capabilities. In Flow Simulation you can have internal or external flow analysis, model and
account for heat conduction, radiation, gravity, and rotation. You can have time dependent
studies when you have oscillations or sliding rotation. Flow Simulation has ~30 different
gasses and ~30 liquids, non-newtonian fluids, compressible liquids and steam to use as the
evaluated fluid.
The very first thing you must do before you begin an internal flow simulation is to make
sure the model or assembly is fully watertight. Fortunately there is a wizard that helps you
create caps on all openings. You can then specify the boundary conditions on any surface,
usually on the inside of the caps. You can specify a pressure, mass flow rate, volume flow rate,
and wall conditions.
After you have set all your boundary conditions and in my case the rotating regions, you
have to set some goals. Flow Simulation will not stop without goals, it can continue refining
recalculating the results indefinitely, so it is important to set some goals. Solidworks treats the
goals as convergence goals, as the value of the goals converges to a finite number it stops
running the simulation. A global goal is a physical parameter of the entire model that you are
simulating (ie. maximum temperature), a point goal is a pressure/velocity/temperature at a
specific point (useful when comparing to real world probe values), surface goals are
parameters of a surface usually an inlet or outlet, a volume goal is a parameter within a
specified volume, and equation goals allow you to combine any and all the goal types (usually
outlet minus inlet to find pressure/velocity/flowrate difference).
After you have your goals set you are ready to run your simulation. After the study is
complete and you have your results there are many ways to display and analyze them. One of
the simplest and most effective is a cut plot. A cut plot is a cross section with a color coded
contour map displaying the differences in a parameter across the cross section. However in
my case the cross section view ended up messy so i didn’t use cut plots. What i found more
useful where flow trajectories, in my case i set these lines to track the pressure and velocity of
the fluid (air) as it went through the turbocharger. You can edit the style and amount of lines,
you can also set a range of values for the color gradient to be as precise as you want to be in a
specific range that may be smaller than the total range.
Figure 6: fluid velocity through compressor
Figure 7: fluid pressure through compressor
I also used a surface plot to show a parameter across a single surface. I chose to
examine the air velocity across a single blade of the compressor. I hid the compressor
housing.
Figure 8: fluid velocity across single blade
Figure 9: fluid velocity across single blade, close up
Solidworks can also generate a report, a word document containing all the setup
information and minimum, maximum, and average values of the temperature, velocity, volume
flow rate, mass flow rate, pressure, and much much more.
I barely scratched the surface of what you can do using Flow Simulation.
Photorealistic rendering:
The solidworks photoview 360 add-in is fairly straightforward. I didn't get into it very deep but
from what I used it was pretty easy to get some nice results. You set a background, position
the camera and if you go to “scene illumination proof sheet” in the “render tools” tab, it
pre-renders ~15 options and you can just click through and continue to refine it until you get
what you want.
Figure 10: scene illumination proof sheet
You can then set the resolution and quality and do a final render. If you set the quality to the
maximum it may take 20-60 minutes to render a single image depending on your CPU and
image resolution.
Figure 11: low quality
Figure 12: High quality
