February 16, 2021

The hydraulic and structural teams have begun working separately now in the design phase of the project. The hydraulic team has been working to create a model of the water slide in Ansys to analyze the flow requirements within the slide. The model has been imported into the program, and a mesh has been generated across the 3-dimensional geometry. The mesh is an important factor in obtaining accurate simulation results. When calculations are performed in the program, they check the activity of the flow within each cell of the mesh and put all of those results together to form the overall simulation. If the mesh is not of a high enough resolution, then the output of the simulation is not good. This is a problem that we have been running into. Because we are using student licenses of the program, we are limited in the number of cells and nodes the mesh can have, meaning that we cannot obtain a good mesh resolution. The pictures below show the mesh as it has been generated over the slide. The color of the mesh describes the quality of its cells where red is poor, and green is good.

Edit 2/28/2021 - We've obtained access to a research license for Ansys that does not have the same restrictions on the number of cells and nodes in the mesh. We are also considering changing the model of the slide to a semicircle instead of full circle or scaling the entire thing down to decrease the computation time.