EFFICIENT MODELING OF ROTATING-DISKS AND CYLINDERS USING A CARTESIAN GRID

Calculations are presented of flow characteristics in the vicinity of disks and cylinders rotating at speeds typical of those found in modem mechatronics machinery. The rotational speeds are slow or intermitten t and the generated boundary layers are laminar and transitional. Comp arison is made with existing experimental data and exact, though ideal ised, analytical solutions. A three-dimensional finite volume procedur e with time dependence was employed as the solution method, and two gr id geometries were used, namely, axisymmetric and cartesian. Use of a cartesian grid is very important, as it is compatible with the design of the interiors of mechatronics machinery and present practice is to model these interiors with computationally economical cartesian grids. Expanding grids were generated normal to surfaces for each of the gri d geometries so as to capture the thin boundary layers. To alleviate n umerical difficulties, when using the cartesian geometry, an expanding and contracting grid was generated normal to the axis of the disks an d cylinders with the grid spacing based on a shifted Chebyshev polynom ial. (C) 1997 by Elsevier Science Inc.