Automotive Soiling Simulation Based On Massive Particle Tracing

Abstract

In the automotive industry Lattice-Boltzmann type flow solvers like PowerFlow from Exa Corporation are becoming increasingly important. In contrast to the traditional finite volume approach PowerFlow utilizes a hierachical cartesian grid for flow simulation. In this case study we show how to take advantage of these hierarchical grids in order to extend an existing Lattice-Boltzmann CFD environment with an automotive soiling simulation system. To achieve this, we chose to constantly generate a huge number of massive particles in user manipulable particle emitters. The process of tracing these particles step by step thus creates evolving particle streams, which can be displayed interactively by our visualization system. Each particle is created with stochastically varying diameter, specific mass and initial velocity, whereas already existing particles may decay because of aging, when leaving the simulation domain or when colliding with the vehicle’s surface. On the one hand the display of these animated particles is a very natural and intuitive way to explore a CFD data set. On the other hand animated massive particles can be easily utilized for driving an automotive soiling simulation just by coloring the particles’ hit points on the vehicle’s surface.