Newsletter december 2020

We wish you a merry Chrismas and a healthy and happy New Year!

CFD simulation burning candle

We regularly analyse devices and electronics with the CFD software FloEFD (Siemens Simcenter FLOEFD). During the holidays many of you will light a candle, nowadays often with LEDs, but what happens if we light a real candle? We can also simulate this with FloEFD, using the built-in combustion module.

When the wick is lit, the wax melts. The liquid fuel is sucked into the wick by the capillary action. Close to the flame it is heated to such an extent that it evaporates and can burn. The evaporated paraffin reacts with the oxygen from the air: combustion. The energy release causes a flame consisting of  hot radiant gas. The combustion products water and CO2 and possibly also soot particles give rise to thermal radiation. We simulated this combustion with the software. During the analysis it turned out that the use of radiant gases was essential for a realistic flame shape. Without the radiation, the flame will be far too long and too round. Since the modeled environment was ideal, no wind and uniform, the flame also became very stable and therefore somewhat boring. To get some movement we varied the fuel supply in time.

In the animation we see results of the real calculation on cross sections colored by temperature and on the candle surface colored by the net radiant flux.

We wish you happy holidays and a healthy and happy New Year

Like for all of you 2020 was a very different year for us. However we are very thankful that we are easily able to do our work from home and also that we still have plenty of work. We want to thank you for your confidence in us. And again we wish you happy holidays and a healthy and happy 2021!

HEC closed between Chrismas and New Year

We are closed from  December 28th 2020 until Januari 1st 2021 . We hope to be of service again from Januari 4th.