Surface Injection

Surface Injection Using DPM — ANSYS Fluent CFD Simulation

Description

This project explores surface injection using the Discrete Phase Model (DPM) in ANSYS Fluent — a powerful tool for particle-laden flows across many industries. Using the Lagrangian approach, you'll simulate and analyze the behavior of particles injected from a surface, a technique essential to spray systems, combustion processes, and particle transport. Surface injection is one of the most basic ways to release particles into a domain, making it a natural first injection technique to master. Within the DPM: Beginner CFD Training Package, this project introduces the first and simplest injection method, building directly on the DPM interface lesson toward the spray and application cases that follow.

Methodology

The workflow begins with creating an optimized 3D cubic domain with surface-injection inlets in ANSYS Design Modeler, then building a structured mesh in ANSYS ICEM refined for accurate particle-flow resolution, with a final count of 92,809 elements. The simulation uses a pressure-based solver for incompressible flow, with a transient analysis and the Discrete Phase Model enabled for particle tracking, together with the gravitational effects and surface-injection parameters that govern how the particles enter and move through the domain. The DPM lies at the heart of the setup: rather than treating the particles as a continuum, it follows each particle individually along its trajectory — the Lagrangian approach that makes DPM so well suited to dispersed, particle-laden flows.

Analysis

Post-processing focuses on extracting and interpreting the results: the 3D trajectories of the injected particles, how they disperse under the influence of gravity, and the injection statistics and evolution of the particle cloud over time through animated results. From these you gain a practical sense of how to tune injection parameters for a given application. The techniques are directly relevant to spray-system design, combustion and fuel injection, environmental particle dispersion, and pharmaceutical aerosol delivery — anywhere predicting where injected particles travel and how they spread is central to good design. By the end of this project, you'll be able to set up a surface-injection DPM simulation, apply gravitational and injection parameters, track particles with the Lagrangian approach, and interpret particle trajectories and cloud evolution — while understanding the advantages of Lagrangian tracking over Eulerian methods.