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During the Fall 2008 semester I have been working on the CFD team. I'm specifically working on simulating the flow field in the sedimentation tank to optimize the design. I spent the first week understanding the problem I'm going to solve and doing trade-off thinking on whether to adopt computational or experimental approach. During the next 5 weeks, I completed a "quick-and-dirty" tutorial of CFD and FLUENT. I learned about the underlying fluid mechanics and numerical methods of CFD techniques, and practiced using Gambit and Fluent with basic simulation problems. And now I'm ready to jump in and create a first mesh. I'm starting from simulating of a 2D cross-section, and will work towards better approximation by iterations of trials.
So far, I'm able to come up with the updated I can come up with more detailed semester goals which are both challenging and feasible, with more details and make more sense.
By reasonably reducing the 3D flow field to 2D and further decomposing the 2D cross-section, I now have a starting point to create the first geometry and the first mesh.
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