Understanding the fluid flow behavior over and into narrow gaps is crucial for many industrial applications, particularly in the automotive sector. Evaluating the potential of water ingress into narrow pathways and towards components is of great importance to design the water management of such components.
The employment of CFD simulations supports the evaluation of potential water ingress into such gaps. Lagrangian based tools are used in a variety of simulation scenarios of fluid flow, especially due to their ability to easily simulate free surfaces with strong curvatures. In our previous work, a validated simulation setup was developed using the meshless simulation tool MESHFREE from Fraunhofer ITWM [8] for simulating water entering small gaps. Especially for industrial use cases, the computation time of several days is too expensive.
Thus, we enhanced this approach to a fast and robust CFD simulation that realizes industrial use cases within appropriate time. The development was conducted in two stages. First, the previously validated simulation method was analyzed with respect to different parameters (e.g. parameters influencing time step sizes) in a simplified benchmark case. This allowed for an initial assessment of their effects on computation time, accuracy, and robustness. Second, the improved parameter configuration was then further optimized for industrial applications to maximize performance across these criteria. The results demonstrate great potential in reducing the computation time. These findings will contribute to improving future work on modeling water pathways inside a vehicle.