Retained Liquid and Bake Drip Simulation Using Geodesic Curves on Triangulations

Simulation tools are becoming more and more popular in the automotive industry since they can significantly reduce the costs required for development of new models. Currently there are many computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools available on the market and becoming indispensable tools for R&D in many of the automotive applications. However there are some applications which require much effort by highly skilled engineers to prepare the model and impractical level of computation time even using a cluster computer using the conventional CFD tools due to the nature of physics and complexity of a geometry such like dip painting process. Therefore, corrosion protection engineers are striving to find an alternative solution. Another issue is that the main focus of those available CFD tools are problems occurring during the dip paint simulations and they omit problems occurring after the object dips out from the bath, such as retained water or bake drips. The presence of these phenomenon on the prototypes often requires change of the design which is in the late stages of development expensive.

In order to specifically solve those issues, a new tool ALSIM was developed using Reeb Graph theory and detection of geodesic curves on the mesh which enables to simulate above mentioned phenomena within in a few days on an affordable desktop PC.