Sidewall Plenum Extension

We’ll look at the sidewall plenum. Specifically, I’m going to minimize some of these sections here just to clean up the design space for now. We’ll specifically look at the hot inlet baffle. If we turn on the hot inlet baffle as well as the infill, excuse me, the shell and our hex core, and look at a cross-section of this, we’ll notice that we haven’t actually capped off all of the flow.

So, it’s important to go through the model and make sure that our baffles are actually extending to enclosing out regions. For me, the quickest way to go about fixing this was to simply just extrude or extend the sidewall plenum region down a little bit. I’m going to isolate this. I’m going to create a new section for a new plenum under the oil outlets.

So, I’ll click here, right click, and add section. I will call this sidewall plenum extension. Now, in this case, we are simply just going to extrude a small section of this plenum downwards. We’re going to add to the C and Cad and implicit references section. We’re going to call the Cardinal Face Points block again. So, Cardinal Face Points and our input is going to be this sidewall plenum. We’ll input zero, see where the first point is, and in this case, it’s here at the bottom. We’ll right click, make variable, and I will call this sidewall plenum bot point.

We have the Extrude block, and in order to define the inputs, we’re going to need a profile, the distance we want to extrude, and the direction we want to extrude in. I’ll double click in here and the section body is going to be defined by the body we want to section cut and the plane that defines that section. So, we’ll select the sidewall, and I want the plane to be roughly at this point, but not exactly at it, because it’s at the bottom of this region. So, I’ll come under the Create tab, I’m going to select Plane From, I’m going to select Plane From Normal, and we’ll drag this down into the sidewall plenum.

Rather than putting the origin at the sidewall plenum point, which would put the plane exactly at the bottom here, we want to push it up in the Z-axis a little bit. So, in this origin, I’m going to type Point, select Point, and from this sidewall plenum, we’ll come under the Block Details and under properties, the X and Y positions won’t move, but we want to add ever so slightly to the Z. We just need to go up a little bit, so I’ll go up by 1 mm, and we’ve now moved that plane or that center point up just a little bit. So, we’ll drag this into our section body plane, and we can isolate just the section body and see this is what we’re going to ultimately extrude down.

I want to tie the extrusion distance to a variable that we’ve already defined, and in this case, I want to tie it to the cell size and specifically to the cell size in the Z-axis. So, if I was to come and change this value to 20, let’s say, I want the extrusion to always be covered by the cell size change. So, this distance value is going to be under the properties tab of the cell. We’re going to grab this Z constant value, and so now whenever we change this, our extrusion is going to change.

And the extrusion direction in this case is going to be 0 0 -1 in the negative Z direction, and that extrusion comes straight down. So, if we change this value to 10, it’s going to move with the cell size. This will always just ensure that we are covered. So, we’ll make this a variable, and I’ll call this sidewall extension. Then we’ll do a Boolean Union. So, under modeling, Union sidewall extension, and we’re going to union this to our sidewall plenum. So, I’ll search for sidewall plenum, make this a variable, and I’ll call this extended sidewall plenum.

Minimize these, and then we’ll go through and do the same thing as we did previously, updating the various components. In this case, we don’t need to remove from our design space, but we do need to update the baffling. So, the sidewall is the inlet for the hot. We’ll come under the hot inlet baffle volume. We’ll do our extended sidewall plenum in here. Our baffle is going to get automatically generated. The final fluid we don’t really need to update because there was just that small thin sliver there. And so all we really needed to do in this case was update this baffle generation.

And if we look now at the hot inlet baffle, the hex core, and our shell, look at a cross-section, remember our whole goal was to just extend this baffle down beyond where the fluids would be forced to mix, closing the cross-section. Going to minimize the sections for now.