Get Santa's Sleigh Running at Mach1

In this edition of 3DVision Technologies’ webinar series, “How to Solve It”, I will show you how to utilize SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation on an interesting problem that faces the one and only Santa Claus!  In this weeks’ webinar I will “Get Santa’s Sleigh Running at Mach 1 in SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation”.

A few weeks ago, one of my colleagues, Ryan Field, presented a “How to Solve It” webinar using SOLIDWORKS Surfacing Techniques.  During Ryan’s webinar, he created a faring, essentially a nose cone design, for the front of Santa’s sleigh.  His faring design, the SOLIDWORKS part, will be included in one of the Flow Simulation projects that I create.  Using the faring attached to the front end of Santa’s sleigh, we’ll take a look at what happens when Jolly Old Saint Nicholas flies at Mach 1!

During the webinar, I show the process of creating a SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation project using the Wizard.  Once the project is created, I will add the necessary boundary conditions to simulate the sleigh running over the ground at a speed of 25 miles per hour.  As this project solves, Flow will track the drag force, lift force, and calculate a (highly idealized) drag coefficient of Santa’s sleigh.  After solving and post-processing this initial project, I clone the Flow project using a different, pre-created SOLIDWORKS assembly configuration.  On the cloned project, I modify several boundary conditions for Santa’s sleigh to fly at an elevation of 1500 feet at Mach 1!  Once this first Mach 1 Flow project is complete, I create another Flow project that includes the Faring design, modify a few boundary conditions and goals, and repeat the process.  I will then be able to review the solved data to determine if the Ryan’s faring design for Santas Sleigh helps at Mach 1.

If you’re interested in a brief overview of additional SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation capabilies, HERE is a good place to start. I hope you watch the recording of my webinar (below) where I show you how to accomplish “Get Santa’s Sleigh Running at Mach 1”.  Now go make your products better with SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation!