Automated simulation of wicket gates with Ansys ACT
Sector: Rail vehicle constructionSpecialist field: Structural mechanicsVoith Hydro uses a wizard (app) developed by CADFEM based on Ansys ACT to simulate various wicket gates of a water turbine.
Summary
Task
Voith Hydro would like to uniformly simulate various standards from the design of wicket gates in terms of structural mechanics. The designers should use an easy-to-use application for analysis.
Solution
CADFEM helped to develop an application program (wizard) for the structural mechanical analysis of the wicket gates using ANSYS ACT (Application Customization Toolkit: Python script-based, XML for graphical user interface). With the wizard, the user is now guided step by step through the simulation workflow.
Customer benefits
The new wizard for supporting the simulation of wicket gates based on ANSYS ACT creates many advantages such as a globally uniform calculation standard, increased employee flexibility in terms of the number of users, error prevention, time savings and integration into the Voith tool landscape.
Project Details
Task
For more than 140 years, Voith Hydro has been equipping hydropower plants all over the world with plant components as a complete supplier. The turbines, available in a wide variety of designs and performance classes, are a central component of the power plants. During the development process, individual designs of the wicket gates are created for various turbines, depending on the size and power requirements of these central control elements. Standards in design and a unified approach to component design lead to efficiency gains in engineering. Therefore, the simulation of the wicket gates should also be standardized. The know-how for structural-mechanical simulation should be made available to the designers as an easy-to-use application.
Customer Benefit
With the new wizard that supports the simulation of wicket gates based on ANSYS ACT, many advantages can be achieved:
- Globally uniform way to calculate a wicket gates
- High employee flexibility, since the designer can perform the calculations themselves
- Error prevention due to a uniform workflow
- Time savings, as it only takes a user about 15 minutes to create a setup for the simulation
- Tailor-made integration into the Voith tool landscape
Solution
The development of the application program (Wizard) for the structural-mechanical analysis of the wicket gates was carried out at CADFEM with ANSYS ACT (Application Customization Toolkit: Python script-based, XML for graphical user interface). With the wizard, the user is now guided step by step through the simulation workflow. A short application documentation is integrated directly into the application interface, so that the relevant information on the necessary input data is immediately available even if the application is only used sporadically. In addition to supporting the user in preparing the analysis, the results are also evaluated automatically to ensure uniform documentation.
Images: © Voith Hydro