Customer expectations are now the focus of every company. These days, creating innovative high quality products before your competitors is crucial to satisfying your customers, and retaining their loyalty so they continue to buy from you in the future. Managing high quality products is particularly critical for all businesses. High quality products help to maintain customer satisfaction and reduce the risk and cost of replacing faulty goods. Companies can build a reputation for quality by gaining accreditation with a recognized quality standard, such as ISO 9001, published by the International Standards Organization.
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and modeFRONTIER are numerical tools that offer important design support, prevent possible quality problems, respect the time schedule, lower the price of components and reduce the cost of making prototypes. The geometry optimization analysis for the conveyor inlet in the new heat pump concept has been carried out by the R&D Department of AristonThermo Group, in collaboration with EnginSoft.
10 geometrical variables were taken into account to increase the performance and reduce the noise of this product. The complete analysis has been performed within a single modeFRONTIER workflow - which allows it to link different software technologies available in AristonThermo Group in a totally automatic manner.
In particular, the original CFD model has been split up into two parts: a fixed part (with no parameters available) and a variable part that can be modified by geometrical parameters. Due to the fact that only the fixed part was meshed, the computation timing was considerably reduced. Response Surface Methodology and specific DOE algorithms - available in modeFRONTIER - allowed us to analyses more than 10000 designs in a few seconds. Thanks to the CFD approach and modeFRONTIER - used in a completely automatic procedure - the fluid flow was spread out by 66% more than in the original design.